(The Guardian) – I’d recently published a book about AI and human consciousness and had spent that year speaking on panels with people who insisted that our minds were fundamentally computational and determined, conclusions that were not so different, on their surface, from the meditation lectures I’d been listening to about the illusory nature of the self. It occurred to me that the whole notion of “sobriety” was a narrative construct I’d been imbuing for years with reality and substance, as though it were a concrete facet of my identity, as though there were a “self” to be sober.

This line of thinking, I can see now, rested on a crucial (and perhaps deliberate) misapprehension of these teachings. The point of recognising the “unreality” of thoughts was to avoid getting caught up in their seductive logic. I had drawn from the lectures the inverse conclusion: that if my thoughts were not real, then they could not possibly hurt me or have any effect on the real world. And if selfhood was just a story, then I could tell that story however I liked. (Read More)