Resolute meditators on occasion experience a deep inner quiet. It is a definite state of consciousness. You will know it if you experience it, but destroy it if you try to analyze it. If you have the good fortune to be vouchsafed such a state of awareness you must humbly accept it and not reflect upon it nor ask questions about it, such as: How did I arrive at this blissful state of mind? How can I repeat this experience? You must simply rest in the experience. Become as a little child and accept the gift with gratitude. One-pointedness is destroyed by analysis.
Mental quiet is a state in which the "mind works" have temporarily shut down in the sense that discursive operations (conceptualizing, judging, reasoning) have ceased, and there is no inner processing of data or computation. You have achieved a deep level of conscious unity prior to and deeper than anything pieced together from parts. You are not asleep or dead but more fully alive. You are approaching the source of thoughts, which is not and cannot be a thought. Crude analogy: the source of a stream is not itself a stream. Less crude, but still an analogy: the unity of a proposition is not itself a proposition, or the proposition of which it is the unity, or a sub-proposititional constituent of the proposition.
Can a computing machine achieve the blissful state of inner quiet? You can 'pull the plug' on it in which case it would 'go dark.' The machine is either on or off (if it is 'asleep' it is still on). But when the meditator touches upon inner quiet, he has not gone dark, but entered a light transcendentally prior to the objects of ordinary (discursive) mind.
I would replace the lyric, "Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream; it is not dying, it is not dying" with "Turn off your discursive mind and swim upstream; it is not dying; it is not dying." "That you may see the meaning of Within."
Can an AI system achieve mental quiet, the first step on the mystical ascent? Cognate questions: Could such a system realize the identity of Atman and Brahman or enjoy the ultimate felicity of the Beatific Vision? Is ultimate enlightenment reachable by an increase is processing speed? You are aware, aren't you, that processing speed is increasing exponentially.
The answer to these questions, of course, is No. When a computer stops computing it ceases to function as it must function to be what it is. But when we halt our discursive operations, however, we touch upon our true selves.
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