The Three Kinds of Laziness

Again, you are right to say that there are many Buddhist ways, not one. While the goal is enlightenment, most Buddhist texts constantly talk about the different ways it has been achieved.

My view of Buddhism is heavily Mahayana and Vajrayana based, and I know little of Hinayana and the other 'vehicles'. In this context, emphasis is placed on one's teacher mainly because it is believed that it is very, very easy to understand things completely wrongly and to go off on a tangent that is harmful to oneself and others. The teacher is thus your guide, while the work of attaining enlightenment is still very much your own.

This of course is not to say that Buddhahood isn't possible without a teacher; it's just that it is rather more unlikely and difficult.

I believe you. I'd be shocked however to learn that it is the consensus in the AI community. Also, many brilliant people said heavier-than-air flight will never happen. Fermi himself didn't believe in supercritical nuclear chain reactions. I'm sure there are some other examples.

But the interesting question is: why is it never going to happen? I can see several reasons:

(1) Dualism is true: we have a soul without which our bodies could not function, and souls cannot be uploaded with mere earthly artefacts. Such machine not only wouldn't be us, they would be nearly empty shells. Like zombies, only mechanical.

(2) Subjective identity does not transfer to the machine along with the information contained in our bodies. While the machine would be a perfect copy, behaving like us and all, it wouldn't be us. Only problem, the others can't make the difference, so your elaborate form of suicide goes undetected.

(3) Mind uploading requires an understanding of the human mind that is forbidden to us because of its deep self-referential nature. Gödel theorems and such. A superior being could do it, but we cannot.

(4) Our minds run on quantum stuff that we can't copy without screwing them (measurements of quantum system tend to have significant consequences on the system).

(5) We could never attain the necessary technological level. Moore's law may cease to apply, we could screw ourselves in a major catastrophic event (World War III, virus from the lab, environmental collapse, Gray Goo accident, Skynet turning the solar system into paper clips… or the banal asteroid).

I think AI people only have authority on (3). Anyway, to the best of my knowledge:

(1) is bunk. The world most likely runs on math, and probably relatively simple math. Sure, we haven't found the complete laws of physics yet, but I have hope.

I wouldn't bet my life on (2) just yet, but it does sound improbable. My confidence is grounded on the fact that current physics say that copy&paste transportation works. If you were disassembled and scanned into a hard drive, then reassembled elsewhere with local material, it would still be you, not just a copy. Mind uploading only have the additional problem of the change of substrate (from neurons to silicon). I'm not sure it's a real problem though, because we could still imagine downloading you back into your body, only with a few additional memories.

(3) Shouldn't be much of a problem, provided we only need a low-level understanding of our inner workings. Self-referential or not, computer viruses are capable of copying themselves, because they don't need to comprehend themselves to do the copying.

(4) Is highly improbable. I know of no evidence pointing that way, and our neurons tend to respond in much more obvious ways to stimuli (easily detectable electrical impulses, modification of the blood stream, sizeable chemical reactions…). Anyway, we should probably ask neuroscientists.

(5) is the most probable in my opinion. That would really suck, but there is a good chance we bamboozle ourselves too deeply to ever recover.

Conclusion: like I said, it's a long shot. Not too long a shot however to give up hope just yet.

The practice to awakening odds are pretty poor. If you were to ask your fellow practitioners how many of them felt as if they fully grasped (experienced) the teacher's teaching, I'd be shocked if more than 1 out of 20 said yes.

Add to that the fact that practice in the Buddhist world is almost always an ass kicker of the highest order (hello screwdriver in the knees), then one wonders why take it up in the first place? The whole process seems a bit like the Christian, "yours is not to reason why"; i.e. it will become clear(er) later.

Saying that, I did meet someone who awakened without a teacher. I suggested that he attend a couple of sitting groups that I used to go to. After the Dharma talk/discussion at each group, without having said a word, both teachers came up to him and basically said, how on earth did you do that?

Talking with him later he said he came into this life to awaken; i.e. it wasn't difficult and he was only just scratching the surface.

Pretty rare obviously, but then again, practicing for 5, 10, 20+ years and awakening is also not guaranteed.

Indeed, hard not to think of the Perl world's Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. Or for that matter of Equord-Hammerstein's good words for laziness.

>I used to be the sort of programmer who would waste all my time surfing the net, and maybe banging out a script once in a blue moon, while congratulating myself on working 'smart'.

If I have tasks to do involving programming, I would naturally gravitate towards doing them rather than screwing around.

Hmm. Perhaps you don't have enough passion for programming. I'm not trying to attack your skills or anything, but if I were you, I'd try to find something that involves coding, so you don't have to learn completely new skills, but that you actually have passion for. Then apply your skills towards that.

The thing about passion is that it makes most every other concern moot. You don't have to worry about procrastination, you don't need to concern yourself with whether you're wasting your life, because you already have something driving your actions every day.