The Buddhist concept of anattā appears in a thought window: “non-self” – no unchanging, permanent self or essence can be found in any phenomenon. And to begin with, there is the story of Vajira, a Buddhist nun (bhikkhuni), one of the earliest women adepts in Buddhist history.
While Vajira was meditating, she was confronted by Mara, a malignant celestial demon king, and he asked about the origin and creator of her “Being”, i.e., her soul. She responded by comparing one’s “Being” to a chariot, showing that it had no permanent existence but was made up of constituent parts: Is it the wheels, the framework, the ropes, the spokes of the wheel?’ None of these things are the chariot but the aggregate of such physical parts composed in certain ways is conventionally understood as a chariot. Just as, with an assemblage of parts, the word ‘chariot’ is used, when the 5 aggregates (khandas) are present in a human, there’s the convention ‘a being.’

Returning to present-times, the following is a transcript of parts of a dougsdharma video by onlinedharma.org: “As the chariot is being taken apart, at what point in the dis-assembly does the chariot cease to be a chariot? Consider the assertion of non-self: What we are is a complex process, a causally inter-related set of parts essentially that creates a sense of self over a period of time. This radically displaces our ordinary everyday sense of self, replacing it with a much wiser and deeper understanding of the way things really are. I would assert that a similar kind of thing happens when we contemplate the complexity of artificial intelligence because, after all, it’s got to have these incredibly complex trained neural networks behind it. In the same way we might say human utterances come out of a very complex network of neurons – literal neurons rather than artificial neurons in a computer.

Let’s look again at how a person is like a chariot made up of parts, in particular five parts which are known as the Five Aggregates. [1. form (the body) 2. sensations (vedana) 3. perceptions (sañña) 4. mental activity or formations (sankhara) 5. consciousness (viññāna)]

All of these five groups of processes are causally interrelated and causally interacting. That causal interrelation among these five different parts is what creates our idea of a self, a person. Then, it’s important to remember that each of these parts can be broken down into further parts.

Form, the human body, can be broken down into the elements and each of the four mental parts can be broken down into subparts. It’s a complex interrelation of many different parts that are basically coming into being and going out of existence over a period of time.

 A lot of this I think, mirrors and reflects what we are seeing now in artificial intelligence; that the self is no different from a very complex causally interreacting machine except for the biology part of it. Now, certainly we can’t see a computer’s mental parts just as we can’t see the mental parts of another human being that is standing in front of us – we infer them based on the behaviour of the object in front of us.

If we see the person in front of us behaving in the way a normal person does, we assume that they have a mind, they have mental parts. Now we may think that the artificial intelligence programs around us are too simple, that they don’t quite meet the criteria of sentience or intelligence. It’s possible we believe that, maybe we’re right, that’s true. But if it is, I would submit that we only need to wait because these programs are getting exponentially more complex, more powerful over time, new versions of these programs will be coming out in the next few years and so these points we’re going to have to meet in the future and probably in the near future.

I think nothing displaces our literal sense of self more than the contemplation of these kinds of artificial intelligences. And the idea that we can now create something that is in certain very deep respects indistinguishable from a human in the way that it interacts with the world. Following that line of thought, I decided to ask one of these programs, the most famous publicly available one which is ChatGPT a question about this about what it made of this relationship between contemporary advances in artificial intelligence and the Buddhist concept of non-self and it had an interesting response.”

Some experts have suggested that the development of advanced AI could challenge our conventional notions of self and identity, raising questions about what it means to be conscious and self-aware. For example, if we were to create an AI system that was capable of learning and evolving in ways that resembled human cognition, would we consider that system to have a ‘self’ or a sense of identity?

In this sense the Buddhist concept of non-self could be seen as a helpful framework for understanding the relationship between consciousness and self in the context of AL. By recognizing that the self is not a fixed unchanging entity, bt rather a dynamic and ever-evolving process, we may be better equipped to grapple with the challenges and opportunities presented by advances in AI and related technologies,

So, I’ll just leave that response there and say that we ae living now in pretty amazing times.”

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Link to doug’s dharma video. Start from the beginning or join the talking at 13.31: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp0zpOYkqMI