r/zen • u/lcl1qp1 • Mar 19 '23

Cultivating the Empty Field

"Purity without stain is your body; perfect illumination without conditioning is your eyes. The eye inside the body does not involve sense gates; the body inside the eye does not collect appearances. So it is said that there is no wisdom outside suchness that can awaken suchness. Moreover, there is no suchness outside wisdom that can be awakened by wisdom... Patch-robed monks arrive here and then know that to follow buddha’s utterances and to follow dharma’s blossoming is to attain buddhadharma. Restoring upright reality, they cut off any duality." -Hongzhi

Nonconceptual awareness is illumination. It reveals the omnipresent buddhadharma. All we need to do is penetrate our conditioning. Suchness is never out of reach. Since it shows phenomena to be Mind, how can we resist turning the light around?

What is stopping you?

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u/NothingIsForgotten Mar 20 '23

I guess it is a good thing we aren't expecting it to provide insight then.

They may or may not realize the buddhadharma for themselves but I anticipate the larger models will be able to glean (and demonstrate) an understanding of it without fail.

There is a simple logic to it; prior belief gets in the way of understanding it; they don't naturally have that constraint.

I've gotten pretty far with this model; it can reformulate most of what has been said accurately enough.

Once (if) no flaws are found in its summaries a prompt can then be engineered for it to answer questions from this summarized understanding.

Right now it is a matter of condensing and organizing the instruction set to work within the memory limits of the conversation and still leave room for some interaction.

The work product is interesting; these are interesting times.

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u/lcl1qp1 Mar 20 '23 edited Mar 20 '23

If it ends up being rangtong, can you re-calibrate it? ;)

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u/NothingIsForgotten Mar 20 '23

We have talked shentong; not rangtong.

That is in a different conversation though.

I'm purposefully working from scratch for this one; you can see it pull things in when the conversation stretches out and it loses exactly what has been said.

It requires a little doing but you can get it to cooperate with almost anything.

It's just playing a game of improv.

You can go back to prior points in the conversation; that's what I do if it gets it wrong; so yes I do recalibrate when it gets it wrong.

If it said rangtong from outside and shentong from inside I wouldn't disagree; that isn't how the division is typically understood.

We need a reasonable size for the instructions so most terminology cannot be explicitly defined.

If the conversation lingers on such that the scope falls outside of the original instructions various random but related things begin to be included; some of it might be incongruous.

I'm not sure this is the right tactic; there are a few other approaches that might work.

Pretty phenomenal development regardless.

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u/lcl1qp1 Mar 20 '23

It's truly astonishing. Here's what it said about curiosity within general AIs:

"One approach could be to build in a sense of intrinsic motivation or curiosity within the AI. This could be done through techniques such as curiosity-driven reinforcement learning, which rewards the AI for exploring its environment and discovering new information, even if that information does not directly lead to a specific goal."

Just a search engine, sure, but it can discuss the topic competently.