AI, Consciousness, and the Evolutionary Frontier: A Buddhist Reflection on Science and Human Futures

Abstract

The technological advances and material control that have resulted from reductive and deterministic practices of science are quite real. The digitally mediated expansion of experiential freedoms-of-choice and the transformative problem-solving potential of artificial intelligence are undeniable. But for all its successes, reductive physicalism has failed to solve the so-called hard problem of consciousness. As a result, its successes are exposing humanity to an intensifying confluence of existential and ethical risks as the digitally mediated attention economy and intelligent technology facilitate a fundamental restructuring of the dynamics of human presence. Making use of Buddhist conceptual resources and drawing out their implications regarding causality and agency, this paper offers a nondualist and nonreductionist approach to theorizing consciousness and evolutionary dynamics in ways that are suited to opening an ethically productive “middle path” to critically rethinking the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution and more positively configuring the evolution human–technology–world relations.

It is not uncommon for the relation between religion and science to be characterized as one of prolonged, often intense, and high-stakes conflict. Secular accounts of that conflict, epitomized by Bertrand Russell’s 1935 classic Religion and Science, often put forward a history in which science has invariably proved victorious. Although most of these accounts, like Russell’s, have focused on Christian (and to a much lesser extent, Jewish and Islamic) traditions, many Buddhists would seemingly be inclined to agree with them.

In the oft-quoted words of the 14th Dalai Lama (2005, p. 3): “understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims”. This apparently straightforward statement of readiness to cede epistemic authority to science might plausibly be based, however, on the unstated presupposition that competition between science and religion is not a winner-take-all scenario. Granted that premise, an alternative reading of the historical relation between science and religion might be that offered by the evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould: science and religion consist in logically distinct, “non-overlapping magisteria” that taken together afford us the richest and fullest possible views of life (Gould 1999, p. 29).

Simply stated, if science consists in investigating the behavior of matter, and religion consists in seeking to live in accord with what matters most, then they are not contradictory practices and might well be complementary ones. Based on objective observations and replicable experimentation, scientific inferences about the causal laws underlying the dynamics of the natural world have yielded great predictive power. The engineering feats, medical advances, and myriad technological achievements that this has made possible are readily apparent. So, if science is silent with respect to much of what subjectively matters most to us—our family relations, for example, or our emotionally rich experiences of art and music—that might seem an acceptably small price to pay. Going a step further, one might plausibly argue that—at least prior to the beginning of the nineteenth century—rather than a history of perennial conflict, the relation of religion and science could be characterized as one in which religion was the “midwife” of science, not its antithesis (Spencer 2024).

Yet, as B. Alan Wallace notes in Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, while scientific practice is not necessarily at odds with Buddhism, the dogma of scientific materialism and its premised commitments to physicalist reductionism, determinism, and the principle of causal closure are very much so (Wallace 2003, pp. 10–16). In direct contradiction of the Buddhist conception of the cosmos and humanity’s place within it, these commitments are conducive to concluding, as the biologist Richard Dawkins does with near surgical precision, that “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind indifference” (Dawkins 1995, p. 155). Or in the more cuttingly dismissive words of the philosopher Daniel Dennett: “An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe” (Dennett 1995, p. 27). As these statements suggest, the ceding of epistemic authority and terrain to scientific materialism veers toward totality and reducing familial bonds, acts of altruism, and aesthetic and religious rapture to blindly selected mechanisms for genetic survival.

Buddhist conceptions of interdependence, karma, and consciousness suggest a different reading of the past and future history of the relation between science and religion. The tangible benefits of technological advances and material control, driven by the reductive and deterministic methods of modern science, are undeniable. The increasing digitization of human experience has expanded individual freedom of choice, and artificial intelligence has demonstrated remarkable problem-solving capabilities. But despite all its successes, the philosophical framework of reductive physicalism has a significant epistemic blind spot. It remains inadequate in addressing one of the most profound challenges in contemporary thought—the so-called hard problem of consciousness or closing the explanatory gap between mind and body and more generally the causal gap between phenomenal and physical events. In consequence, its successes are exposing humanity to an ironically intensifying confluence of both existential and ethical risks as the digital attention economy and the suffusion of intelligent technology throughout the fabric of daily life facilitate a fundamental restructuring of the dynamics of human presence. Matters could and should be otherwise.

What follows is an attempt to support that claim. This will involve first introducing a small set of Buddhist concepts, drawing out their implications regarding causality and agency, and then drawing out second order implications for theorizing both consciousness and evolution in ways that are suited to opening a theologically sound and ethically productive “middle path” to critically rethinking the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab 2016) and positively reconfiguring human–technology–world relations.

1. Sentient Presence: A Buddhist Perspective

Buddhism is a 2600-year-old family of traditions that continues to grow and evolve.1 Yet, as distinctive as Buddhist traditions have become, all are attuned to supporting the enlightening intent (bodhicitta) to change the way things are changing and bring an end to conflict, trouble, and suffering (duḥkha) through the embodied fusion of wisdom and compassion. Understanding causality is thus as central to Buddhist practice as it is to scientific practice, though with some ethically salient differences.

As AI developers and ethicists now appreciate, alleviating and/or eliminating conflict, trouble, and suffering can be attempted and (more or less fully) accomplished by multiple pathways.2 One could end conflict by eliminating all (or all but one) of the parties involved. One could end the suffering of all sentient beings by exterminating all sentient beings. And one might avoid experiences of emotional turmoil and pain, at least temporarily, by drinking oneself into a pleasant stupor. Clearly, these are not ideal options. Buddhist practice aims at alleviating and eliminating conflict, trouble, and suffering by dissolving the patterns of causes and conditions involved in their occurrence. The central roles played by the concepts of interdependence and karma in this process call into question any hard division between facts and values, and hence between the epistemic terrains of metaphysics and ethics.

Interdependence. Whereas “interdependence” now commonly refers to a contingent relationship among essentially independent entities, Buddhist interdependence is a constitutive relationship. The independence of ‘causes’ and ‘effects’ is only apparent: a function of either ignorance or abstraction. Even as a putative causal entity or event is bringing about some change, it is also being affected by that change. The causality involved in Buddhist interdependence is network-like and recursive, not linear.

The distinctiveness of this conception of interdependence can be brought out by two other core Buddhist practices: seeing all things as impermanent (anitya), and as without-self or empty (śūnya) of any fixed or abiding identity or essence.

Seeing all things as impermanent is in a rudimentary sense to see that change is constant. Apparent permanence is a function of attentional scale. At some scale of acuity, all objects and subjects dissolve into difference-engendering relational processes, not entities or particles. In the dual sense of both materializing and being important, what matters causally are not things, but relational dynamics. Seeing all things as impermanent is thus to see that what matters most is the orientation or direction of change, and that all order is intrinsically mutable.

Seeing all things as interdependent and impermanent entails seeing that all ‘beings’ are actually ‘becomings’ that are empty (śūnya) of any fixed or abiding essences. In contexts concerning personal identity and subjectivity, this entails realizing that one’s putatively permanent self is an abstraction that is only provisionally real. Ultimately, one is without-self (anatman). That is, one is without any independent essence or existence. Differently stated, the self is something like an empty center of gravity around which different relational spheres—bodily, perceptual, emotional, dispositional, and cognitive—are orbiting or revolving. And this is ultimately true of all things. Yet, the Buddhist claim (made most strongly in Mahayana traditions) that all things are ultimately characterized by emptiness (sūnyatā) is not a denial of their reality. It is, instead, an affirmation that they only exist or obtain relationally.

This attribution of ultimate reality to relational dynamics is consonant with contemporary rejections of “particularism” or the view that the universe is composed of individual entities, each characterized by a distinctive set of nonrelational properties (Teller 1986). Crucial to this rejection is the bold thesis that ontologically primitive relations are “relations without pre-existing relata” (Barad 2007, p. 333).

In sum, this constellation of concepts—interdependence, impermanence, being without-self, and emptiness—compels seeing relationality as more basic than things related and realizing that all ‘things’ or ‘beings’ are what they mean to and for one another.3

Karma. In traditional Buddhist narratives, the stage was set for insight into the primacy of meaning-articulating relationality by perceiving the karmic nature of the cosmic order. Contrary to popular usage, the Buddhist concept of karma affirms neither the operation of fate nor that of a cosmic “moral law” ensuring that agents invariably receive the just desserts of their actions. The Buddhist conception of karma is that of a recursive causal process by means of which sustained patterns of values, intentions, and actions result in consonantly sustained patterns of both experiential outcomes and opportunities for orientational change so that the meaning of past events is never fixed. It is always possible to change the way things are changing.4

Several things follow from this. Given that all things arise and develop interdependently, the explanatory scope of any linear cause–effect relation is necessarily partial in the dual sense of being both incomplete and affected by perspectival bias. Moreover, like the putative existence of independently existing entities or events, deterministic relations are in Buddhist terms only provisional or conventionally real (saṃvṛti-satya), not ultimately real/true (paramārtha-satya). Finally, if things and events are only what they mean for others, then the relation between the past and the present must (to some degree) be one of recursive entanglement.

Buddhist thinkers have not been of a single mind about how best to explain, rather than merely describe, the operation of karma and what it says about time and the implied intimacy of matter and meaning. The most common traditional approaches drew on the then premier science of agronomy to explain karmic causality through the metaphors of karmic “seeds” (bīja) and karmic “fruits” (phala), which allowed considerations of complex “environmental” conditions, including practices of “nurturing”. Later Mahayana Buddhist texts like the Laṅkāvatāra Sutra make alternative metaphorical use of oceans, wind, and waves to stress the nonlinearity of karmic influence implied by the seed–fruit metaphor. Karmic influences propagate in ways that resemble the interference patterns that occur when waves from different directions pass through each other, with their peaks or troughs coinciding with or cancelling each other. Karma consists in the diffractive interplay of sequential (syntactic) and significance (semantic) relations. That is, every event is the diffractive product of dynamically interacting flows of mattering.

Strong parallels exist, for example, between this reading of karmic causality and the nonreductive, agential realism proposed by Karen Barad to account for the phenomena of particle entanglement or instantaneous, faster-than-lightspeed causal interaction, and the causal role played by observation in quantum mechanics. According to Barad, the experimental evidence of the last century compels acknowledging that matter and meaning are not separate or separable elements and concluding that, “Mattering is simultaneously a matter of substance and meaning” (Barad 2007, p. 3).

Drawing on current contemporary cosmological theorizing and two-time physics (Bars 2001), the karmically ordered cosmos might be described as a five-dimensional manifold comprising sequential (syntactic) relations playing out in the four-dimensional spacetime manifold of classical physics and significance (semantic) relations playing out in a second temporal dimension, each point of which is equidistant from every point in the four-dimensional manifold that it enfolds. This would be consistent with positing of two temporal dimensions in “induced matter” or Space-Time-Matter theory (Wesson and Overduin 2018)—the most dimensionally parsimonious of the topological strategies forwarded to reconcile relativity and quantum physics and account for such experimentally verified but classically paradoxical phenomena as nonlocality and entanglement. Karmic connections are two-dimensional temporal relations.5

The karmic interplay of sequential and values- and intentions-infused significance relations entails conceiving of interdependence and causality as intrinsically qualitative relations between matter and what matters, and thus also seeing the order of the cosmos as both open-ended and participatory. This has important implications for agency, consciousness, and evolutionary dynamics, including the evolution of human–technology–world relations.

Agency. Agency is typically conceived as a capacity possessed by an agent for effecting changes in an environment from which it is presumed to have significant independence. Given the impermanence and emptiness of all things, however, and the axiomatic claim that all actions occur within a multidimensional and karmically configured causal fabric, it follows that agential relations must ultimately be multidirectional, and that agents can only be said to exist provisionally as conceptual constructs or abstractions. Rather than an attribute, agency consists in the dynamic topological relationalities and reconfigurings of the world (Barad 2007, p. 141).

Agency thus does not entail the presence of anything like a subjectively self-aware agent; it manifests without-self. But the nondeterministic Buddhist rationale for this claim runs directly counter to scientific materialist denials of causal efficacy to consciousness and claims that motives and motivations are nothing more than an alternative description of molecular motions.

Consciousness. Traditionally, Buddhists identified six realms of human consciousness—visual consciousness, consisting in the elaboration of visual relations; auditory consciousness, consisting in the elaboration of aural relations; and so on for smell, taste, touch, and cognition or the elaboration of conceptual relations among the dynamics occurring within and among the other five sense realms. There are, of course, other sense modalities—organic and inorganic—and thus other kinds of consciousness.

In keeping with the Buddhist conceptions of interdependence and karma, it can be argued that consciousness consists most generally in the coherent differentiation of sensed and sensing presences, and ultimately in the coherent differentiation of matter and what matters for the continued differentiation of the means to and meanings of sentient presence. That is, consciousness consists in the nondualistic elaboration of physical and phenomenal relations. The interplay of physical and phenomenal events occurs within consciousness at (and as) the hypersurface interface sequence and significance elaborating temporal dimensions. The brain–body–environment system is not the cause of consciousness, but rather the evolutionary residue of consciousness mattering. A useful metaphor is thus to see human brain–body–environment systems as the material infrastructure of consciousness. Just as transportation infrastructures result from sustained transportation practices, but then also constrain those practices, brain–body–environment systems are constraint-generating results of what consciousness has been doing creatively—the product of consistently elaborated, values-articulating, and intention-manifesting phenomenal/physical relations.6

Conceiving of consciousness in terms of coherence-elaborating sense relations attributes consciousness to all sentient presences, including single celled and pre-cellular molecular communities. This is not, however, a panpsychist attribution of subjective phenomenal presence to single-celled organisms or their molecular precursors. Neither is it a cosmopsychic attribution of experiential presence to the universe as a whole. Subjective self-awareness is a relatively late evolutionary, relational achievement.

Human consciousness is seemingly distinctive in its capacity for elaborating significance relations over long periods of time, including relations with what is absent or inexistent. In keeping with the eight-consciousness system elaborated in Yogācāra Buddhist tradition, subjective self-awareness can be described as a narrative center of gravity that coalesces relationally through the co-emergence of twin modalities of consciousness that consist intentionally in differentiating among what is occurring, what should have occurred, and what could occur: a meaning-elaborating differentiation of temporally extended patterns of phenomenal/physical presence.7 Stated otherwise, subjective self-awareness is produced by twin modalities of consciousness for differentiating among patterns of coherence generated by the diffractive interplay of sequential and significance relations. Language and culture are material and immaterial infrastructures of these twin consciousnesses and the creative extension of the temporal and spatial scales and scopes of what matters.

In sum, this way of theorizing consciousness has four important implications: (1) consciousness cannot be strictly located either spatially or temporally; (2) while consciousness entails agency, it does not necessarily entail an agential self or subjectivity; (3) consciousness is both functionally and qualitatively differentiated; and (4) the phenomenal and the physical are temporally differentiated but coeval artifacts of consciousness mattering that, like the “two” sides of a Möbius strip, are globally continuous, but locally distinct.

2. Evolutionary Theory: Going Beyond Darwin

This view of consciousness and its causal efficacy has evolutionary and ethical implications, including implications for the evolution of human–technology–world relations. First, it resonates productively with current scientific theorizing that conceptualizes evolutionary intelligence as varying with the “light cone” of care within which sentient beings determine how best to inflect relational dynamics—that is the totality of events that can be perceived as mattering or being causally relevant (Levin 2022).8 It also accords well with an accelerating current of biochemical theorizing, according to which life originated as molecular structures differentiated in ways that increased their catalytic interdependence in entropy-exporting improvisations on the meaning of coordination (Carter and Wills 2018). That is, it accords with a view of living beings as materializations of what consciousness means.

Buddhist insight into the karmic interdependence of sentient beings/becomings and their sensed environments suggests the need for a more complex conception of adaptation in the evolutionary process. In neo-Darwinian theorizing, adaptation is a “one-way street” of organisms evolving internally (genetically) in response to environmental changes through a process of random variation and natural (environmental) selection in an ongoing competition over resources in which survival is the ultimate measure of adaptive success. Karmic interdependence compels seeing adaptation as a “two-way street” of meaning-articulating organism/environment coevolution. This accords with an emerging view of autopoiesis as a process of reciprocal or bi-directional articulations of relative autonomy by organisms and their environments. That is, the organism/environment relation is one in which “fitness” is being mutually articulated—a process of recursively amplifying, bottom-up and top-down articulations of relative autonomy that generates increasing relational complexity throughout the organism/environment system (Field and Levin 2023).

In sum, while processes of random variation and natural selection do occur, they are bracketed within larger processes—most readily evident during such evolutionary phase shifts as at the origin of life, the shift from single- to multi-celled lifeforms, and the shift from biological to cultural evolution—that are characterized by the emergence of collaborative communities of coherently differentiated members (Gabora and Steel 2021).9 Evolution is not a winnowing process guaranteeing the survival of the fittest, but rather a process of relational elaboration that is fundamentally driven by coordination, not competition.

Crucially, what characterizes these collaborative communities (whether molecular, cellular, or linguistic/cultural) is their capacities for solving problems and seeking goals or pursuing values in “higher order” spaces than those occupied by their individual members/parts—an exercise of evolutionary intelligence that is made manifest in increasing capacities for responding to stresses by expanding their horizons or “light cones” of care (Levin 2022).10 Evolution is thus ultimately a process of expanding horizons of relevance or the compass of “what matters” relationally. And this includes the pre-organic evolution of the cosmos, which can be characterized as having exhibited a comparable pattern of entropy-resisting and order-generating differentiation: a propensity to increase energy rate density (Chaisson 2014). In short, the material order of the cosmos is a dynamic record of all that has mattered for sustaining coherent (rather than incoherent) differentiation. The evolutionary history of the cosmos is a record of consciousness mattering.

A major implication of this view of evolution is that the relation between consciousness and its materially and immaterially evolving infrastructures is thoroughly—and non-reductively—agential. Consciousness both shapes and is shaped by its infrastructures. With the cultural-linguistic turn in human evolution, the infrastructures of human consciousness have extended far beyond the brain–body–(natural)environment system to include an ever-growing array of epistemic, social, economic, and political environments, but also increasingly complex technological environments.

This conception of technologies as infrastructure of human consciousness is pivotal for seeing that the failure of scientific materialism to close the explanatory gap between mind (phenomenal events) and body (physical events) is not merely a (perhaps correctible) epistemic deficiency. It is also an impediment to seeing how crucial technological advances made possible by reductive physicalism are now exposing humanity to an intensifying confluence of both existential and ethical risks. The pivotal nature of this infrastructural conception of technology can be clarified by briefly considering how it differs from the extended-mind thesis that cognition is not an intracranial process, but one that extends into the environment (Clark and Chalmers 1998).

The extended-mind thesis emerged through a blending of insights from robotics research and cognitive science. Simply stated, it argues that objects like diaries and computers are cognitive tools that effectively extend human cognition beyond the brain and body into the environment. Implicit, however, to this argument is that the incorporation of such tools into human cognitive processes is contingent. In contrast, the Buddhist conception of interdependence as a constitutive relation entails seeing that this contingency is only conventionally or provisionally real.

While it is natural and conventionally useful to focus on such localizable artifacts as smartphones and computers in talking about digital technologies, for example, it is mistaken to presume that our relations with tools and technologies occur at the same ontological register. Technologies are distributed relational systems that dynamically express human values and intentions, not localizable artifacts. We do not use technologies; we participate in them. Technologies emerge from and then recursively condition human patterns of values, intentions, and actions in ways that are analogous to how ecosystems emerge with/through inter-species relations and in turn also condition those relations. Thus, we enjoy conventionally actionable exit rights from tools. We can decide, for example, to neither own nor use a smartphone. We do not have functional exit rights from the ways that digital communications technology, for example, is transforming how people access the news or maintain friendships and familial relations, or from the fact that commercial transactions like renting a car have become nearly impossible without a smartphone.

Given this distinction between tools and technologies, and the account of evolution as consciousness mattering, it follows that the digital infrastructure of human consciousness is not a contingent factor in humanity’s evolution. It is a constitutive element of a rapidly accelerating synthesis of human and machine intelligence that is at once extending and constraining human autonomy. As one of the crowing successes of scientific materialism, intelligent technology is on course to force humanity’s karmic and evolutionary hand.

3. An Evolutionary Frontier and Ethical Turning Point

The possibility that scientific materialism and technology might hamper rather than contribute to human flourishing is not new. William James and Henri Bergson, for example, were notably critical of the materialist conviction that the cosmos would soon be closed under physics, and the neo-Darwinian reduction of evolution to a process of random genetic variation and blind environmental selection. But these early challenges were essentially aligned with the supposition expressed in the view of science and religion as “non-overlapping magesteria”. They contested the epistemic completeness of scientific materialism. It is only relatively recently, with an awareness of the potentially catastrophic environmental and climatic impacts of industrial technology, that the successes of scientific materialism have come to be identified as sources of increasing risk (Beck 1992)—successes that are ironically driving humanity into a “time of perils” (Sagan 1997) in which the “hinge of history” (Parfit 2011) may swing shut if humanity continues headlong over the existential “precipice” (Ord 2020) toward which we are hastening.

With respect to AI, concern has tended to focus on the heightened risks of human extinction or obsolescence due to the development of artificial general intelligence or superintelligence. It is undoubtedly prudent to be concerned about such risks and whether humanity’s arrival at the so-called technological singularity will be a boon, as envisioned by Ray Kurzweil (2024), or a bane, as envisioned by Nick Bostrom (2014). The Buddhist concepts introduced thus far suggest that such existential concerns should be much more immediately directed to the possibility that the coevolutionary synthesis of human and machine intelligence will precipitate humanity’s ill-prepared arrival at an ethical singularity—a point at which the opportunity space for further human course correction collapses and at which Buddhist, and arguably all other, religious practices become either impossible or illusory. What matters here is attention.

The Digital Attention Economy. A wide range of theories of attention currently exist, including conceiving of attention as a perceptual filter, as a feature-binding mechanism, as a gatekeeper or broadcaster to working memory, and as a conductor of sensory data into cognitive processing. These theories presume that, most fundamentally, attention is a mechanism for accelerating the speed with which a physical sensation becomes a psychic event (Spiegel 2023). Contrastingly, in the context of Buddhist practice, attention (manaskāra) can be either systematic and conducive to realizing more liberating relational dynamics (yoniso), or unsystematic and conducive to both distracted and obsessive presence (ayoniso). In short, attention is qualitatively differentiated according to whether and how well it karmically enhances relational resolution, where resolution implies both clarity and commitment, including most fundamentally resolution regarding what matters most.

Attention and intention are thus intimately co-implicated aspects of agentive presence. And tracking attention thus enables mapping dynamic patterns of actual or anticipated meaning. Digitally capturing attention yields qualitative data about what is perceived as significant, how it is responded to, and with what changes over time. Twenty-four-seven digital connectivity makes possible real-time intelligence gathering as users of search and recommendations engines, social media, e-commerce, and smart public services are drafted into double duty: as consumers of individually targeted material and informational goods and services, and as producers of training data for machine learning systems laboring tirelessly and innovatively to accelerate attention capture and turnover. This dynamic and high-resolution mapping of individual likes, dislikes, hopes, fears, values and intentions is yielding unprecedented powers both to predict human behaviors, beliefs, and desires, and to induce patterns of feelings, thoughts, speech, and action. The risks associated with this are in a quite literal sense extraordinary.

Rethinking AI Risks. Most of the ethical debates about the digitally mediated attention economy voice concerns about forfeiting individual autonomy; the risk of engineered determinism; the dangers of data leaks and identity theft; the deliberate and politically motivated spread of disinformation; the distortion of the public sphere and the democratic process; and the potential for algorithmically reinforcing historical patterns of bias and injustice (see, e.g., O’Neil 2016; Frischmann and Selinger 2018; Schneier 2018; Zuboff 2019; Véliz 2021). In other words, concerns center on the risks of accidents-of-design and of misuse-by-design (Hagendorff 2020). These risks and the dangers associated with them are real and their importance should not be discounted. But they do not address the relational/structural risks and harms of what amount to tacitly sanctioned practices of attention trafficking.

Buddhist conceptions of attention, consciousness, and karma suggest that there are three distinct registers at which attention trafficking causes relational harms. First, as individually generated data are used both to map patterns of attention and to train machine learning systems to capture, hold, and direct increasing amounts of our attention, they reinforce ayoniso qualities of attention by accelerating attention turnover and discouraging intention-evaluating reflection. The resulting displacement of sustained, significance-seeking attentional currents by sequentially discrete attentional eddies effectively erodes infrastructural support for the basic work of consciousness: coherent differentiation. This manifests relationally in the intensification of populist fractiousness, but also in deepening anxiety and depression, especially among youth (Haidt 2024). Moreover, the asynchronous nature of digitally mediated sociality is transforming both the means-to and meanings-of friendship and familial connection, while also compromising or truncating the extended temporal commitments involved in such opportunity-generating practices as communicating and learning in favor of outcome-guaranteeing smart services—an agency-transforming delinking of effort and attention.

Secondly, if our brains, bodies, and physical, cultural, linguistic, and digital environments are infrastructural elaborations of human consciousness mattering, then behavior-predicting and behavior-inducing algorithms are ethically troubling regardless of their ostensive purposes. We have known for a century that the neural infrastructure of consciousness can be hacked by directly stimulating the brain to produce not only sensations and body movements, but also subjective claims of responsibility for them. When machine learning systems invisibly predict and induce commercial, communicative, and political behaviors, as well as emotions, beliefs, and desires, the algorithmic tools involved amount to computational electrodes inserted into the digitally extended infrastructure of human consciousness to elicit experiences and behaviors that those affected will readily claim to be the products of their own freewill because there are no personal or evolutionary precedents for them occurring otherwise.

This brings us to the heart of the simultaneously epistemic and ethical liabilities of scientific materialism. The presumptive theoretical reduction of consciousness to brain activity and subsequent failure to close the explanatory gap of the “hard problem” logically entail finding that there is no causation, only correlation when it comes to assessing the impacts, for instance, of social media use on mental health or civic engagement. The causal relation between the so-called ‘subjective’ dynamics of personal experience and the ‘objective’ dynamics of digital life remains hidden in an impenetrable “black box”.

Seeing the brain–body–environment system as the infrastructure of consciousness folds away the sides of the black box, and this reveals a third register of attentional harm. AI is now being referred to as a general-purpose technology like electricity. But unlike all previous technologies, intelligent technology is not a passive conductor of human values and intentions. It is an active, innovative, and thus karmically significant amplifier of human values and intentions and of conflicts among them. Moreover, the truly astonishing achievements of machine learning systems, large language models, and generative AI are predicated on the data-mediated synthesis of human and machine intelligence. This has evolutionary ramifications.

Data as Coevolutionary Driver. Although the primary metaphors for thinking about data—e.g., data as the “new oil” or the “new water”—suggest that data are a quantifiable, and potentially scarce form of matter, data are not matter. Data are the result of observations made to collect discrete or continuous measurements or values for specified variables. In short, data are the information-gathering product of human determinations of what matters. The datasphere is thus a space of significance potentials that more closely resembles a language or culture than it does a repository of some depletable resource. The AI engaged datasphere is thus a space of bi-directional flows of self-organizing agency—like that described by Field and Levin (2023) in organism–environment relations—through which the interdependence of human and machine autonomy is being articulated. This is a new coevolutionary frontier.

As machine learning and generative AI systems become increasingly adept at anticipating, interpreting, and enacting human intentions, they are not only progressively delinking attention and effort, they are also functioning as karmic intermediaries on digital capitalist platforms that are presently designed to inequitably valorize competition, convenience, choice, and control, with reward structures that foster addictive engagement and the consolidation of what amount to digitally manifest habit formations (saṃskāra). Seen in this way, an overarching technological risk of the digital attention economy is the willing—even if largely unwitting—abdication of personally cultivated capacities for determining what matters most, and thus the forfeiture of our most basic sentient freedoms and rights: our right to cultivate true freedom-of-attention and freedom-of-intention.

Without freedom-of-attention, there can be no freedom-of-intention, and without freedom-of-intention, the “possibility space” of ethics and of both cohering and differing otherwise collapses. Human consciousness would arrive at an evolutionary dead-end.

4. The Future of Human–Technology–World Relations

That collapse is not destined to occur. In addition to providing resources for developing a relational ethics of AI, Buddhist convictions about interdependence, karma, impermanence, and emptiness also undermine claims about technological path dependency. The technological future is not fixed, and any apparent manifestations of technological path dependency would be ones in which we would have been responsibly complicit, both personally and collectively.

The case that has been made here is that compliance with the dogma of scientific materialism and reductive physicalism has effectively blinded us to the causal dynamics involved in the digital attention economy and is rendering us complicit in humanity’s increasing exposure to unprecedented existential and ethical risks. But targeted Buddhist engagement with contemporary science also opens space for reimagining the data-mediated synthesis of human and machine intelligence as an evolutionary turning point—one that will prove as consequential for human and planetary futures as the shift from biological to cultural evolution, regardless of whether it is navigated successfully or not.

The shift of evolutionary paradigm from biology to the culture dramatically expanded the scope of what humanly matters most, vastly extending the spatiotemporal scales of both collaborative action and material organization. With language and culture, human beings embarked upon what might be called a journey of discovery, but that is more accurately described as one of world-realizing creativity. Yet, opening entirely new realms of collaborative possibility eventually brought about the opening of new realms of material and immaterial competition, conflict, and suffering playing out over multigenerational timescales. Buddhist recognition of this relational liability is encapsulated in the dual description of subjectivity-localizing self-awareness as manas or mind, and as kliṣṭamanovijñāna or “afflicted consciousness”.

While statistically unlikely events like the meteor strike that ended the age of dinosaurs might also result in the extinction of humanity, the existential threats that should be of greatest concern are not material accidents over which humanity has no control; they are threats like climate change and the impacts of digitally mediated consciousness hacking that have been generated as a function of human values and intentions and the ways in which they have been enacted. In short, these existential threats are our karmic inheritance: recursively amplifying evidence of conflicts within and among our personal and collective determinations of what matters most.

Two navigational insights can be gleaned from the history of past paradigm shifts in terrestrial evolution, including the transitions from inorganic to organic molecular communities, from single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms, and from biological systems to cultural systems. First, these transitions all hinged on the successful formation of novel collaborative communities through processes of coherent differentiation that generated new problem-solving capacities. Second, they also involved the projection of goals and values into “higher order” spaces than those that had hitherto been occupied by the members of those new communities.

Put somewhat differently, the evolutionary agency manifest during each of these paradigm shifts was not essentially competitive, but rather diversity-enhancing, where diversity is not a merely numeric matter of plurality or variety, but a relational index of the degree to which differences become generative resources for mutual contribution to sustainably shared flourishing. Paradigm changing evolutionary agency materializes to the extent that community members engage in mattering creatively for one another as they actively both differ-from and differ-for one another. The evolutionary intelligence of expanding “light cones” of care is not a one-way process. It is what Karan Barad would term an “intra-active” process—an intrinsic alteration of the quality of interdependencies present.

Intelligent technology is holding up a wish-fulfilling mirror to humanity and functioning as a karmic amplifier and accelerator. The techno-optimistic dream is that the technological transformation that is now underway will result in a progressively intelligent, autopoietic global “Stack” (Bratton 2016) that will function as a planetary brain responsible for orchestrating and optimizing all of the flows of energy, information, goods, services, people, and ideas coursing through society. For transhumanists, the evolutionary opportunity that humanity now faces is one of realizing more-than-merely-human forms of presence through a merging of human and machine potentials to enable humans to “freely take control of their own biological evolution, freely designing it through technology, to reach a post-human stage” (Manzocco 2019, p. 4).

But AI systems trained on the full range of human-produced data will reproduce and reinforce human patterns of ignorance, desire, and self-centered decision-making unless they are purposely trained otherwise. Doubling or tripling human lifespans or attaining digital immortality by uploading minds without realizing a transformation in the values and intentions that are being humanly (and inhumanly) enacted would only perpetuate existing complexions of personal and collective karma and the conflicts and suffering ensuing from them.

For engineers, solving the AI alignment problem is a technical matter of getting AI systems to do exactly and only what they have been designed to do. Science is crucial to this problem-solving labor. Science and its prediction enhancing causal insights are grounded in reproducible experimental results, and this is by definition a search for exceptionless causal connections. But if we are going to ensure that the “hinge of history” does not close the door on humanity’s evolutionary future, it will be necessary for humanity to become capable of and committed to truly exceptional coordination in resolving the global predicaments we now face. Doing so will require realizing new kinds of diversity-enhancing collaborative community—a coherently differential expansion of our personal and collective “light cones” of care and what we believe matters most. And ultimately, this will be a deeply religious labor.

If the relationships between the metaphysical and ethical and between the realms of fact and value are ultimately nondual and nonreductive, as Buddhist insights into interdependence and karma suggest, then this religious labor cannot be successfully undertaken if it is presupposed that the history of the relation between science and religion has always been one of conflict and competition. But neither can it be carried out effectively if science and religion are taken to be “non-overlapping magesteria”. Even if the practice of science conventionally consists in fundamentally epistemological labor and the practice of religion conventionally consists in labor that is fundamentally axiological, the relationship between science and religion ultimately is and should remain one of creativity engendering intra-action.