Balaji Prasad
By Balaji Prasad
“where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
the cycles of heaven in twenty centuries
bring us farther from God and nearer to the dust.”
~ t.s. eliot, Choruses from the Rock
I sketch a small circle in the air with my hand, as expansive as my stretched arm will let me. Then I look up at the trees around and notice how much bigger than me they are. As I ponder this, I hear the sweet chirps of the birds, unaware that I am experiencing a deep sense of calmness from all this. There is a punctuation too, of a bit of a cacophony from what appear to be the cicadas that descend every once in a while, from somewhere, who knows from where and for what.
My eyes and my ears catch the gentle rustling of the leaves as they sway to an errant breeze that ebbs and flows with a mind of its own that I realize I can’t quite fathom or predict.
I cast my eyes upward, further. Blue as far as the eye can see. An infinity. And white fluffy puffy forms that are the amorphous clouds that punctuate this divine composition — surely from the harps of the gods?
Then… the sun. The bright, resplendent glowing sun! The bestower of life and nourishment. The trees wouldn’t be there without the sun. Maybe, I too wouldn’t.
Me, eternity, and maternity
And, as I stand there among the green and white, blue and red giants that tower over me, I take in big and greedy gulps of what the kind forestry breathes into me. Oxygen. The thing that makes me be. They give me life. As does the sun to the both of us — the trees and me.
My mind flits again, back to the air-circle that I drew with my hand, in the midst of all this grandeur. The thing on the inside of this little circle is me! Everything else is outside it. At a scale that is hard to grasp by the little speck within the little circle that I drew.
Am I really that small and that insignificant!? Aren’t humans supposed to be a highly evolved and intelligent species, whatever that means? Or am I shortchanging myself? My body, after all, performs some extraordinary feats that are hard to replicate even by the most admired specimens of the human race.
For example, if I cut my hand, there’s some kind of electrical wiring that comes out of the box that makes the thing called “me” to be aware that something undesirable is going on, which, in turn, causes something else to pull my hand back, rather rapidly. In an instance of this kind that I recall, a little blotch of blood appeared on my finger. Miraculously, in a little while, something inside my body caused some patching to occur that eventually made my hand whole again, and as good as it was when it shipped from the manufacturer.
And, talking about “shipping”, that is an extraordinarily miraculous thing too. There is a complex choreography that an associative-memory comparison to a UPS or FedEx would be a desecration of a sanctum sanctorum. Hormones, enzymes, blood flotillas of various shapes and sizes, various coatings, shields and secretions, all kicking into gear in a complex cadence of rhythms and flows that move like clockwork in a mother-to-be-woman’s body. And then the package delivery happens. But no UPS truck outside. No obvious driver standing there to thank or to give a tip to.
So maybe… maybe the speck in the circle is not so insignificant after all! It is another one of nature’s numerous miracles, except that it is in a smaller bottle within the smaller circle that I drew with my hand.
There is an infinity outside. And, there is an infinity inside. So, I am indeed “intelligent” but not in the way that I have been taught. It is a deep and innate intelligence shaped and sculpted by the hand of nature – the same nature that sculpted the sun and the skies, and their infinite intelligence.
An I for an AI, a truth for untruth
A universe in the infinite circle. And one in the speck. Is it possible to see this, live in it, and abide with implicit trust in all this? Or have the words and numbers and all the gobbledygook stuff called “intelligence” gotten in the way?
Is man’s self-aggrandizing notion of “intelligence” something that blocks him from recognizing his true gifts of innate intelligence and the intelligence of everything around him? Does the conscious mind have the unfortunate potential to make the human so so unconscious of the real world – the beautiful universe – that he has been, thanklessly, gifted with? Can this “artificial intelligence” mind be reoriented and realigned so that there is a new dawn: the dawn of true human intelligence. It would seem all the more desirable in a world where AI’s like ChatGPT, Claude and others are aggregating and consolidating the AI that is displayed by billions of human heads and that the expert human AIs are starting to call “superintelligence”. Are we going to bloat the AIs’ “heads” to be as bloated as ours? Should we?
Do we need to re-mind ourselves not to be AIs before it is too late?
Balaji Prasad is an IIT/IIM graduate, a published author, SAT/ACT Online and in-person Coach, and K-12 Math Tutor at NewCranium. Contact: balaji.prasad@newcranium.com.
