Great piece, Sebastian! I myself make a slightly different distinction than your death/living thinking, distinguishing between the the conditioned, programmed thoughs and behaviors versus the real free will we have in certain moments (which can be cultivated through mindfulness, meditation, etc.).
I just cant help but point out that maybe your naming here is too negatively evocative for the "death-thinking" where this as you describe it is not really that negative as the name suggests? Because in one way or another, you need this kind of thinking to lead a balanced life (e.g. the buddhist ideal of wisdom would consist entirely of death-thinking), and it's not really desirable to outsource *all* of it to AI, even to treat it with negative sentiment actually.
But maybe I misunderstood the notion? I see that once you've lived through the majority of your life, you naturally stop exploring or playing and start just being with who you are. And that's okay. Actually, that's the only way it can be.
Jàchym, thank you for taking the time to read this piece so attentively and for sharing your perspective. I find it very enriching. I took more than a month to reply because I wanted to reread the post, read your comment carefully, and compare it with recent readings and self-inquiry.
Far from arguing, I want to build upon your questions: they led me to revisit my steps and my own reflections. I do agree with you that “death-thinking” may sound negatively charged, yet it also rings like an alert: a signal of how we may poison our minds by relating our being to death-matter, projecting onto our creations and our future only what we already know, our stored past experience.
Lately, inspired by reading Eckhart Tolle, I’ve been reconsidering the mind and its capabilities as a tool, much like an LLM. We tend to identify with our minds (its stories and narratives) but we don’t learn how to use a hammer and then define ourselves as the hammer. In this sense, perhaps I failed to clearly articulate the notion of living and death thinking. Since this distinction also resonates with the principle of polarity, they are not separable, nor should they be.
I think you grasped the main point: that with the emergence of astonishingly advanced technologies such as LLMs, we may have an opportunity to “be” in the sense of directing more energy toward reflecting with our hearts and bodies, and less toward the mind understood as purely cognitive and rational procedure. This is where the only form of “free will” we may have resides: the choice of being.
Beautifully said. I wish more people would see that the option of being is always there, at any time. In one sense I agree it's "sort of a silent death" if we never exercise the option of being and remain thinking only, but on another level it's not clear to me how people actually arrive at the point of stopping to think, so I'm careful with claiming the people that think all the time are somehow in the wrong. In any case they are missing out though. So yeah, using the latest technology to move people out of constant thought should be a big priority and I hope it'll get more attention from startups and the like.
Great piece, Sebastian! I myself make a slightly different distinction than your death/living thinking, distinguishing between the the conditioned, programmed thoughs and behaviors versus the real free will we have in certain moments (which can be cultivated through mindfulness, meditation, etc.).
I just cant help but point out that maybe your naming here is too negatively evocative for the "death-thinking" where this as you describe it is not really that negative as the name suggests? Because in one way or another, you need this kind of thinking to lead a balanced life (e.g. the buddhist ideal of wisdom would consist entirely of death-thinking), and it's not really desirable to outsource *all* of it to AI, even to treat it with negative sentiment actually.
But maybe I misunderstood the notion? I see that once you've lived through the majority of your life, you naturally stop exploring or playing and start just being with who you are. And that's okay. Actually, that's the only way it can be.
Jàchym, thank you for taking the time to read this piece so attentively and for sharing your perspective. I find it very enriching. I took more than a month to reply because I wanted to reread the post, read your comment carefully, and compare it with recent readings and self-inquiry.
Far from arguing, I want to build upon your questions: they led me to revisit my steps and my own reflections. I do agree with you that “death-thinking” may sound negatively charged, yet it also rings like an alert: a signal of how we may poison our minds by relating our being to death-matter, projecting onto our creations and our future only what we already know, our stored past experience.
Lately, inspired by reading Eckhart Tolle, I’ve been reconsidering the mind and its capabilities as a tool, much like an LLM. We tend to identify with our minds (its stories and narratives) but we don’t learn how to use a hammer and then define ourselves as the hammer. In this sense, perhaps I failed to clearly articulate the notion of living and death thinking. Since this distinction also resonates with the principle of polarity, they are not separable, nor should they be.
I think you grasped the main point: that with the emergence of astonishingly advanced technologies such as LLMs, we may have an opportunity to “be” in the sense of directing more energy toward reflecting with our hearts and bodies, and less toward the mind understood as purely cognitive and rational procedure. This is where the only form of “free will” we may have resides: the choice of being.
Beautifully said. I wish more people would see that the option of being is always there, at any time. In one sense I agree it's "sort of a silent death" if we never exercise the option of being and remain thinking only, but on another level it's not clear to me how people actually arrive at the point of stopping to think, so I'm careful with claiming the people that think all the time are somehow in the wrong. In any case they are missing out though. So yeah, using the latest technology to move people out of constant thought should be a big priority and I hope it'll get more attention from startups and the like.