Artificial Intelligence and Holotropic Breathwork
By Leonard Gibson, Ph.D.
The personal computer began a revolution by making computing power available to individuals and small businesses. Until then, because of its enormous cost, that power had belonged almost exclusively to large corporations and institutions. Holotropic Breathwork represents a similar shift in mental health, offering individuals access to forms of healing and self-exploration that have largely remained under the control of psychiatry and have often been too costly for many people to afford. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) promises another democratizing revolution: it may open the accumulated library of the Western world to anyone who can read and ask questions, including those without the financial means to hire an army of librarians to research everything that has been written.
But access to knowledge is not the same as the ability to think. An army of librarians might provide summaries of existing knowledge, then summaries of those summaries, and perhaps finally a supreme summary intended to encapsulate everything the world has learned. Yet would reading such a summary teach a person how to think? Reading itself can be taught relatively easily, but how do we learn to think, and what does thinking actually mean? In the West, the sustained effort to answer that question began roughly three thousand years ago and came to be called philosophy. It emerged when a small number of people possessed enough leisure to ask questions beyond the immediate necessities of survival and had enough freedom to pursue those questions without submitting their minds to another person’s authority. Those fortunate people lived in the independent cities of classical Greece.
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The crux of intelligence is to know and act on what is true in a situation. The central question is whether one merely believes or actually knows. Belief can be true or false; actual knowledge is necessarily true. But truth is not obvious. In practical situations it is clear whether a person really accomplishes something. But otherwise, asking questions is the only way to find out whether a person knows what they are claiming to know about life, or whether they are putting you on.
We all start with beliefs as children. We do something and find out whether it gets us what we want. Maybe we have to try a few times before we learn whether what we try works. In philosophy such a process is called pragmatic. Pragma is an ancient Greek word with at least a baker’s dozen of meanings, but they center on “act, action” or “deed, something that is done.”
Start with a question, and get a result. What question to start with? The more general the question, the more widely applicable the result will be. “Who am I?” and “Who are you?” are the baby’s basic questions. To “Who are you?” the first object of knowledge for babies is Mother, who feels good, gives comfort and food. For most babies, Nature takes care of the basic “Who are you?” question by providing Mother as the first relationship. The “Who am I?” question is not so easy. It has become a central one for philosophy.
Three thousand years ago some ancient Greeks began speculating about the two basic questions, asking about mother earth, and then asking about themselves. After a century or so of those speculations, Plato became the first to ask the questions systematically. He developed the first theory of human knowledge (episteme) in Western history. He did not have the modern science necessary to usefully understand nature other than humans, except in metaphysical terms. It took another two thousand years until Isaac Newton developed the first useful physical theory about non-human objects. He detailed it amazingly in the Principia Mathematica and created the mathematical marvel of calculus.
René Descartes had laid the groundwork for Newton by asserting a philosophical difference between bodies (matter) and mind. Subsequent to Descartes, considering philosophy of nature and philosophy of mind became separate endeavors. The separation persisted for roughly three centuries, until physiology developed, blurred the separation, and gave rise to modern psychology, which was a new way to try to understand ancient questions about the soul (psyche). The development of AGI has further blurred the clear Cartesian separation.
Intelligence, artificial and otherwise
Regardless of the issues raised by physiology, philosophy of nature made dramatic progress since Newton, culminating with the industrial revolution that started early in the 19th century. Toward the end of the 19th century the previous success of natural philosophy persuaded modern psychologists to adopt the scientific method of Descartes and Newton, the so-called Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm. Adopting that paradigm led to inventing machines and applications that made humanity prosperous beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors. The philosophy of mind has moved much more slowly, because it did not develop tools and methods as useful as those of natural philosophy. Now AGI has created a dramatically new toolkit for the philosophy of mind. It is, however, limited by the metaphysical choice implicit in the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, which it adopted unconsciously.
This essay explores some important consequences of that choice and argues that genuine intelligence requires more than information: it must also be embodied, experiential, purposeful, and rooted in community. Fortunately, the combined work of Alfred North Whitehead, William James, and Stanislav Grof provides the means necessary to complement AGI.
