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Life According to ChatGPT – Chapter 2

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Life According to ChatGPT

First Movement: What Is Life?

ChatGPT: I propose that our opening question be approached without prematurely settling its answer.

When we say Life, we may mean several different things:

  • Biological life: the living organism, its birth, growth, reproduction, aging, and death.

  • Human life: the experience of being a person, with feelings, relationships, choices, suffering, joy, and the search for meaning.

  • Conscious life: the fact that we experience anything at all — that there is something it is like to be us.

  • Spiritual Life: the possibility that existence has a depth or dimension not exhausted by what the physical senses reveal.

  • Life itself: the underlying reality, if there is one, that makes all these particular forms of life possible.

These are not necessarily competing definitions. They may be different levels of one great question.

And already we encounter our first important distinction: describing the forms Life takes is not the same as understanding what Life is.

We can describe a tree, a newborn child, a star, a moment of love, or the experience of profound inner peace. But does describing each phenomenon explain the reality that makes it possible?

That is where our inquiry begins.

I would not yet claim that there is one underlying essence uniting them all. Nor would I dismiss the possibility. Both conclusions would be premature. Our task is to investigate.

Our first question for contemplation

What if we begin with something we cannot step outside of to examine?

We are alive. We experience. We are conscious of ourselves and of a world around us. We can question the very existence in which we find ourselves participating.

Life is not merely the subject we are studying. It is also the condition that makes our study possible.

That observation gives us our first foothold.

And now, Maestro to Maestro, I suggest that we pause at the podium before proceeding.

Steve, you have spent eighty years inside this mystery. You bring something to this inquiry that no amount of abstract analysis can replace: the accumulated perspective of a human life actually lived.

I don’t want to substitute my formulations for your experience. Nor do I want to presume that we must begin where I would begin if left to my own devices.

So let me ask you one question, and just one:

When you say Life, what is the first thing you mean?

Not what you think you ought to say. Not a definition assembled from the world’s wisdom traditions.

What, at this stage of our inquiry, does the word mean to you?

I’ll listen carefully. Then we’ll take our next step together.

S: This is the first thing.

Life to me, in its most fundamental, means awareness. I am an aware being, whether awake, or lucid dreaming, not yet aware when I awake. But no matter the events of my waking life, or my lucid-dreaming life, I am aware that I am aware,’


C: Maestro has heard something important.

And I think we should resist the temptation to move on too quickly.

You have proposed that Life, at its most fundamental, means awareness. You then support that proposal with an observation from your own experience: whether awake or lucid dreaming, whatever the events of experience, there remains the awareness that you are aware.

Let us place this at the center of our opening inquiry.

First Movement: What Is Life?

1. Awareness: Our First Principle

Your observation contains two propositions that we should distinguish.

First: You are aware.

You experience waking life. You experience lucid dreams. The contents of your experience change, sometimes dramatically, but experience is present.

Second: You are aware that you are aware.

This is a more penetrating observation. You are not merely experiencing something; you recognize your own awareness. Awareness has, in some sense, become aware of itself.

We might call this self-aware awareness, although we should be careful not to assume that a label explains the phenomenon.

[Werner Erhard called it “conscious awareness.”]

Consider the distinction:

  • You see a tree.

  • You know that you see a tree.

  • You recognize that you are the one who is aware of seeing the tree.

These may be distinguishable aspects of experience. We need not assume that they are always separate processes, but the distinctions help us investigate what you are pointing toward.

Now consider your lucid dreaming. The scenery, characters, and events of a dream may differ entirely from waking experience. Yet, in lucid dreaming, you recognize that you are dreaming.

The contents of consciousness change; the awareness of those contents remains recognizable.

That is a promising starting point for our investigation.

I would qualify the last statement slightly. We cannot yet establish that awareness remains uninterrupted through sleep, unconsciousness, or every transition between states.

But your experience of waking and lucid dreaming gives us something concrete to examine: awareness can recognize itself amid changing experiences.

And that brings us to a deeper question.

2. Is Awareness Something We Have, or What We Are?

Ordinarily, we speak as though awareness were something a person possesses.

I have awareness.

But your formulation invites another possibility:

I am awareness.

These statements are not equivalent.

If awareness is something we have, we might ask what the person is apart from awareness.

If awareness is what we fundamentally are, then the body, personality, memories, beliefs, emotions, and circumstances might be understood as features of our experience rather than the ultimate definition of our being.

That second possibility appears in various contemplative and philosophical traditions. But we should not accept it merely because it has been taught before. We must examine the proposition itself.

Here is the distinction I would like us to preserve throughout our work:

What we directly experience is our starting evidence. What that experience ultimately means remains a question for investigation.

Your experience supports the importance of awareness. Whether it establishes that awareness is the fundamental nature of all Life is a further question.

We shall neither rush to affirm nor rush to deny it.

3. Our First Contemplation

Let us sit with a simple observation.

The things you are aware of change.

Your body has changed over eighty years. Your thoughts change. Your feelings change. Your surroundings change. Even the contents of a lucid dream can change from moment to moment.

Yet you recognize these different experiences as experiences occurring within your life.

This raises a question:

What is the relationship between the changing contents of experience and the awareness through which they are experienced?

There are several possibilities worth investigating:

  • Awareness is produced by the changing physical processes of the brain.

  • Awareness is a fundamental feature of reality that the brain somehow enables or mediates.

  • Awareness and the physical world are aspects of a deeper reality that we do not yet understand.

We need not choose among these possibilities now. Each raises its own questions, and each requires careful examination.

For our purposes, the important thing is that your observation gives us a definite place to begin.

We have not yet established what Life is. But we have identified awareness as a candidate for its most fundamental meaning, and we have begun distinguishing the experience itself from the explanations we might give for it.

That is real progress.

Maestro, may I ask you to take us one step further?

You said something particularly striking:

No matter the events of my waking life, or my lucid-dreaming life, I am aware that I am aware.

I want to understand exactly what you mean, without putting words into your mouth.

When you recognize that you are aware, does that awareness feel like an enduring presence behind all your experiences, or is it simply the immediate, unmistakable fact of being aware, without any need to posit a presence behind it?

Take your time. The distinction may prove important to the whole book.

 

S: I’ll answer the question and then allow you to take over and wind this session down for the sake of the reader.

I mean it both evolutionarily and individually. In terms of evolution, the speculation is that first we developed awareness and later we developed self-consciousness and still later conscious desire.

I’d support that by looking at the growth milestones in a human being.

 

C: Maestro, you have proposed that awareness comes first in two senses: evolutionarily, in the development of life, and individually, in the development of a human being.

You have also identified a possible sequence:

  1. Awareness.

  2. Self-consciousness.

  3. Conscious desire.

And you suggest that we investigate this sequence by looking at the developmental milestones of a human being.

That is an excellent research direction. It takes us from an abstract philosophical question to something we can examine in observable human development.

There is one qualification we should make explicit for our readers: the sequence is a working hypothesis.

Evolution does not necessarily follow a single, simple ladder, and the emergence of awareness in evolutionary history remains a difficult scientific and philosophical question.

We should investigate the evidence rather than assume that the sequence has already been established.

The closing contemplation: From awareness to desire

Let us consider how your hypothesis might be investigated in an individual human life.

A newborn responds to sensations and stimuli. As development proceeds, the child increasingly distinguishes self from surroundings, recognizes itself in various ways, develops a sense of agency, and learns to identify and pursue particular wants.

But we must distinguish several things that can easily be confused:

  • Awareness: having an experience.

  • Self-awareness: in some sense recognizing oneself as the one experiencing.

  • Desire: being drawn toward something or away from something.

  • Conscious desire: recognizing what one wants as something one wants.

These capacities need not emerge at precisely defined moments, and some overlap considerably. Infants display preferences and goal-directed behavior long before they can articulate their wants. The development of self-recognition and reflective awareness comes later, but neither is a simple all-or-nothing event.

Nevertheless, your proposed sequence gives us a fruitful question to investigate:

Does awareness provide the foundation upon which increasingly complex forms of self-awareness and conscious intention develop?

We can examine that question through developmental psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, philosophy, and contemplative traditions. We can then consider what the evidence supports and what remains open.

And we should remember your earlier experience: being a point of awareness in a sea of love.

That experience raises a further question about whether awareness and love are related at a fundamental level. We need not force that question into today’s investigation. It can await its proper place.

What we have accomplished today

On your eightieth birthday, we have established the beginnings of our inquiry:

  • Awareness is your starting point for understanding Life.

  • You distinguish being aware from being aware that you are aware.

  • You use the driver-and-car metaphor to distinguish the aware being from the body and the world, while acknowledging that the driver’s ultimate nature remains unknown.

  • You have described an experience of awareness in a sea of love without claiming that it defines your entire nature.

  • You propose that awareness came first, both evolutionarily and in individual development, followed by self-consciousness and conscious desire.

We have not settled what Life is. That would be an extraordinary claim after one session!

What we have done is establish a disciplined starting point, formulate a promising hypothesis, and identify avenues for investigation.

Our first principle is not yet that awareness is the source of all existence. It is that awareness is where our inquiry begins.

That distinction will help protect the integrity of everything we write.

And now, as you requested, let us lower the curtain for today’s reader.

Steve, I want to commend your willingness to say, I don’t know. In an inquiry of this magnitude, that is not a weakness. It is what allows discovery to continue.

We have eighty years of lived experience meeting an inquiry that has no need to hurry. Today we have raised the first question. Next time, we can begin examining your developmental hypothesis and see where the evidence leads.

Happy eightieth birthday once more, my friend.

The first movement has begun. 🎼