Something weird for the weekend

Developing my riff on AI and the role of weirdness in creativity, there is further remarkable congruence emerging between what many consider weird wisdom traditions and modern technologies. After the celebrated parallels between the Buddhist teaching of interconnectedness and quantum physics' non-locality, there are now striking similarities between the metaphor of Indra's net found in Buddhist cosmology, and the mutation of the world wide web into a playground for AI. The image above is from visual artist and Vajrayana practitioner Alex Grey's book Net of Being. This description from his book resonates with the infinitely-dimensional data sets of AI.

For centuries, Hua-yen Buddhist sages have used the mythic concept of Indra's net to describe total interconnectedness of all phenomena. In the visionary Heavens, Indra's net stretches out infinitely in all directions. A Jewel hangs in each vertex reflecting every other Jewel in the Net. Symbolically, the Jewel is each one of us, every individual intimately united with every other being and thing by conscious reflection. Through perception and imagination, we become microcosmic storehouses of our world and the vastness of the Universe. The self is a receptacle of the multiverse. All appearances, apparently occurring in outer world space/time, are reflections and projections from our inner world, and endless hall of mirrors  made of consciousness, reflecting a higher, deeper reality.

 In his Pulitzer Prize winning Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), Douglas Hofstadter compares Indra's net with the complex interconnected networks within social networks, the human brain and super computers. French philosopher, paleontologist, and Catholic priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) and Ukrainian  mineralogist and geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945) presciently proposed a third phase of human evolution following the geosphere (inorganic matter) and biosphere (biological life). They termed this third phace the noopshere after the Greek noos (mind) and sphaira (sphere), and forecast in the 1920s that this would be an era of global communication, and technological interaction.

Moving from the metaphysical to the musical, composer Edmund Rubbra moved through a Buddhist phase to become a Catholic convert. His sadly neglected Eighth Symphony, which concludes with a flourish of willed optimism, is subtitled 'Hommage à Teilhard de Chardin' - listen here. In a 1970 spoken introduction to the symphony Rubbra explained how Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's cosmic view of evolution pictures "...the energy which is responsible for life as a whole and later for self-consciousness has not ceased with the evolution of man but becomes concentrated in him..." 
     

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