What is the "self" in the age of Artificial Intelligence

The Gita, AI, and I

Dear Global Jigsaw,

I am now one-week old in China, and bursting with observations. The only problem is that I change my mind on what I have to say on a daily basis.

China is transformed. No wait, scratch the surface and its the same. China is booming. No wait, its actually stagnating. The Chinese are more free than ever before. But wait, they are also more pacified. There is an oft recounted fable about every foreigner feeling ready to write a China book after spending a week in the country, while the ones who’ve been here for years are tongue tied when it comes to answering seemingly simple questions. The “truth” is so complex and nuanced it evades accurate articulation in a soundbite. And more you know, the less you know.

That said, I will be posting (provisional) learnings from my early days in Beijing on a regular basis going forward. But for today, I bring you a guest post that looks at philosophical questions to do with self and identity raised by AI’s inexorable rise, with the Hindu epic, the Gita, as guide.

The author Gurcharan Das is one of India’s foremost public intellectuals, known for his expertise in both the worlds of business and ethics. He is the author of, among other books, The Difficulty of Being Good.

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The Gita, AI, and I

One wintery evening in Delhi I received an unusual call from New York. At the other end was the soft voice of a charming man, representing a company that was bringing out the world's classics using Artificial Intelligence. The book they had chosen from India was the Bhagavad Gita, and he wanted to know if I'd be willing to be the author, a sort of guide for the book.

"But what is this animal -- a classic using AI?" I asked sceptically, also wondering if the voice at the other end was human.

He explained gently that readers would be encouraged to pause while reading the text and ask a question if they had a doubt. At the end of each chapter, they would engage in a discussion. The answers would come from my cloned voice based on twelve to fifteen hours of interviews conducted with me in advance.

Fascination and horror

My reaction was of fascination and horror! I was instantly captivated by the possibilities of such an interactive book -- how this might breathe life into the classics. I wished I'd had a such a personal tutor while reading the Gita when I was young. Or when I was reading those incomprehensible Germans -- Hegel and Kant -- when studying philosophy at the university.

But just as quickly I was overcome with doubts and suspicions. AI opened in my mind troubling questions of identity, selfhood and authenticity. I felt uncomfortable being cloned, having a twin suddenly. Ironically, these are the same questions -- Who am I? -- that the Gita also addresses. Who indeed will be my cloned twin providing answers to questions about human identity in this AI book?

The friendly voice at the other end laughed reassuringly as it had cottoned on to what was going on in my mind. It must be a human voice! He added that their company had already published half a dozen classics. Well-known names like Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood had signed up for future classics. I was flattered to be in such august company. But I told him that they might have made a mistake in choosing me. The guide for the Gita would more appropriately be a Sanskrit scholar who had spent a lifetime interpreting the text or a spiritual Guru. I was neither. I was an agnostic, in fact, and although I admired the Gita, I did not fully buy its message.

"There are plenty of Gurus and scholars around, I added. 'Perhaps, I can suggest some names,".

What a stroke of luck!

No, I was the right person, he insisted. Wasn't I the one who had brought the great epic of India, the Mahabharata, to life in my book, The Difficulty of Being Good. He wanted me to do the same with the Gita. A scholar or a Guru, he felt, would take the audience back to the "wonder that was ancient India". He wanted someone to bring the Gita to the 21st century. Sensing my hesitation, he suggested I think about it and we could speak in a week or two.

When I recounted my conversation to my wife over dinner, she was surprised that I was hesitating. While pouring a liberal helping of aubergine curry on her basmati rice, she exclaimed, "How lucky can you get! Imagine spending the last years of your life unravelling the mysteries of the great book of India."

"But it's a deeply religious book, and most of it is directly from God's mouth!"

I don't even know if God or anything transcendental exists."

She knew that I'd had never been able to make the leap of faith. She could hear the angst in my voice and tried to reassure me.

"But you've always respected believers. You admired your father, who was a lifelong mystic, meditating two and half a day. And you're attracted to the Mahabharata, the fifth Veda. The Gita is, after all, embedded in the epic."

"But the Mahabharata is a literary work," I protested.

"And the Gita is a philosophical poem!"

I had to admit she was right. In an odd sort of way I am attracted to the Hindu epics and even to Hinduism. It doesn't have a single prophet, a single church, or a single book. It's a big tent making room for all sorts of beliefs. I can be an atheist and still be a respectable Hindu. It has 330 million gods, none of whom can afford to feel jealous. Because they are all symbols of the One. Even though I don't believe in the 'other world', I do share the Vedic man's feelings of awe and wonder at the mystery of existence.

As we rose from the dining table, she repeated, "What a stroke of luck to have this fall in your lap!"

What new could I offer?

She was right, of course. It didn't take long to persuade me that this was an opportunity of a lifetime. To read the Gita at this stage in my life was a privilege given to few. But I was still bothered. I was daunted by the hundreds of commentaries on the Gita over the centuries. In an argumentative country everyone had his own opinion of the Gita. What new could I offer to the reader?

A few weeks later the same charming voice from New York called back. He was happy to learn that I'd agreed to do the book. Before we hung up, I wondered again if they had made the right choice in selecting me. The Gita was about the meaning of life and I was still searching for it. It had been really frustrating recounting my search in my recent book, Another Sort of Freedom. Did I want to go through it all again?

"That's precisely why we want you. You know better than I that the Gita is not aimed at believers alone, but also at the millions of searchers in the world looking for some sort of purpose in life. You are a philosophically inclined, literary person, and the Gita is a philosophical and literary poem. Yes, it's a good fit."

It was agreed in the end. He'd send me the contract in a few weeks. When might we begin the interviews, he asked. I needed time to read and re-read the Gita, as well as some of the commentaries. Most of all, I needed time to think. We decided to begin the interviews in 2025 autumn. Before concluding, I mentioned that if I was going to put in so much work into the AI project, I might as write a conventional book of essays, raising broader questions on the Gita. He consented as long as it was a sufficiently different book.

After he hung up, I was left alone to deal with my AI monsters.

My three interns

In the spirit of the Age, I acquired three AI interns to assist me with research on the Gita: Chat GPT, Perplexity, and Claude. ChatGPT is the most empathetic, Perplexity is best at research and gives links to follow-up, and Claude has a literary style. Gemini is a good standby. They are not only surprisingly competent but cheerfully, tirelessly deliver the results at the speed of light. When I have occasionally pointed out that something is not quite right, they readily try again. There is no hint of complaint or the need of approval. Each time they reply with calm assurance and keep getting better at their work. What I got last week was better than six months ago. I feel grateful they've taken away so much of the drudgery of looking for a specific text, cross-referencing it, and even summarizing it before I decide to read the actual book.

Since the invisible labour of research has been eased, I have more time to think about philosophical questions posed by the Gita. I find myself playing thought games. "What if the Buddha had been Arjuna's charioteer?" is one of them. Another is a paradox: how does one explain that MK Gandhi, the apostle of peace and non-violence, and Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi apostle of war and violence, were both inspired by the Gita? Himmler trained SS Officers quoting from the Gita; Gandhi did the same with volunteers fighting for India's freedom.

But I also have lingering worries about my love affair with my three interns. Much as I feel gratitude, I feel somehow less connected to their findings. I'm troubled by my lack of ownership for some of their conclusions. I have less memory recall of their work. I try and reassure myself, saying "Oh it's only me; I'm just growing old." But no, I find an alienating distance from the AI output. It would have felt different if I had patiently done the work myself.

AI as one's operating system

I think while I write. My thoughts are fuzzy before I put them down but they get clearer as I read them in a proper sentence. Writing for me has become a tool for thinking. I am also a compulsive re-writer. My wife feels I waste of a lot of time re-writing, but I find that both the writing and the thinking becomes clearer in the end. There is great reward to find an elusive thought expressed in a clear, original, brief and bold sentence. AI in comparison seems to flattens thought. It is a little bit too easy, too fluent, too bland.

Thinking is an individual lived experience. I worry about the young who rely too much on AI and do not practice their mental muscles while growing up. I am not thinking only of future writers. It is a cautionary note for anyone for whom AI is not merely a tool in their hands but has become their operating system. How then will they know the pleasure of discovering a new idea for themselves? Will they be able to find their own voice, their own style?

It feels scary having my fictional twin running about

AI has opened up for me profound questions about the self, identity, and authenticity. The moment I began to conceptualize my AI book on the Bhagavad Gita, I felt uneasy, a feeling that I was delegating my own personal inquiry to a machine. 'Who am I?' is a question that I feel is a lived experience, not to be answered by a machine. The idea of a 'cloned twin' of my thoughts providing answers feels almost a betrayal of what has been a lifetime journey.

I have begun to worry about being cloned by a machine. It feels eerie having my fictional twin running around giving talks, making podcasts and videos on my books, racking up hundreds and thousands of viewers. There is also the weird possibility of a feminine clone with a persuasive woman's voice saying all kinds of things that I've never said. Even more scary is the thought that my clone may clean up my bank account, and confirm the transaction on the phone via voice recognition software.

After watching the clones of others performing on WhatsApp, I am afraid of how I will perceive myself when my replica begins to mime my behaviour. What will my friends think of me when they find me spouting all sorts of fake stuff? Even when they realize their mistake, they will still carry this worrisome image of me. I worry that my clone will know everything, including my memories, things that I don't want to talk about. And if there are multiple copies of me, an entire of army of fakes? It's a sickening thought. Then there is the problem of time. We are all evolving, and my clone will be stuck in the past, based on data when I was first interviewed for the Gita book. My clone will be a stale version of me. And what if my clone turned out to be more sympathetic than me? And how would I feel if a close friend of mine actually developed a closer relationship with this compassionate clone? I'd feel jealous, cheated, and a fool.

The Gita weighs in on the problem of identity

Two thousand years ago the Gita too wrestled, oddly enough, with the same metaphysical problem of the self. It concluded that our normal human belief in our individuality is, in fact, the problem.

The Gita claims that my day to day sense of identity is an illusory perception created by the human ego. It posits that there is a true, permanent self or soul (atman) which underlies our transient, perceiving selves, and it is identical with the cosmic spirit (brahman). Awareness of the oneness of everything is, thus, the Gita's central teaching. Human beings mistakenly identify their minds and bodies with reality. If one agrees with the Gita, the exalted notion of individuality or the lived experience of an individual, so prized especially by modernity, turns out to be false. Gita calls it 'maya', an illusion.

While I agree with the Gita's analysis about the tenuous nature of my phenomenal identity, I do not buy into its belief in the eternal atman or the cosmic brahman. As I mentioned, I am an agnostic and have so far not been able to make the leap of faith to accept its transcendental conclusion. But I do agree with Gita's claim that an authentic identity is shaped internally through duty, awareness, and lived experience -- not through external mimicry. What bothers me is that a second layer of falsehood has been added by AI. If the Gita devalues my day to day self, thinking of it merely as a fictional narrator of my life, AI goes further. It adds fiction upon a fiction. Both the Gita and the AI have made me doubly aware that the exalted notion of the human individual of my modern, liberal life is fabricated. Grappling with these two fictional selves has left me totally befuddled.

Three Aspects of Being Human

AI raises fundamental questions about what it is to be human. The only thing I can be sure of at this moment are the thoughts and feelings going through my head. If I look into my consciousness I cannot find the thinker of these thoughts, nor the feeler of these feelings. The Buddha faced this problem as well but reached the opposite conclusion to the Gita. He too could not buy the notion of a permanent, underlying, transcendent soul (atman), and resigned himself to live with the idea of no-self (anatma). Western philosophers and neuro-scientists have also tried to locate the self but they haven’t found it either.

Since the young today are growing up using AI all the time, people worry. What if AI becomes their operating system? Might they lose touch with reality? But then what is reality? What we call reality is what we can perceive. Both Eastern and Western philosophers are agreed that we can never know the 'thing in itself', as Kant put it. We can only know our own perceptions, and yours are different from mine. The Gita, of course, goes further. It calls our world of subjective perceptions an illusion. On a lighter note, this sort of thinking might have led Mark Twain to quip that there is no difference between fiction and non-fiction -- only fiction has to make sense!

The fear that AI might become sentient one day is real. Before that happens, however, AI has formidable hurdles to cross. One of them is that human experience is inherently subjective, and cannot be explained in objective terms. Take the famous example of the red apple. When I observe this apple, it invokes all kinds of feelings of redness inside me. At times it could be the negative memory of blood oozing out of my brother’s leg in a road accident when we were teenagers. Or the positive remembrance of rosy cheeks of Renoir's young girl in his famous painting. Philosophers call this the subjective content of my consciousness (qualia). The Gita would argue that qualia is not a product of the brain and body but of atma, the spirit or life force. But the question is how will AI duplicate qualia, which is private, unspoken, and different in eight billion humans?

A second hurdle for AI to achieve consciousness is the need to replicate my brain's biological neuron-specific physiology which generates the unique sensation of redness in my subjective experience. It does it via my brain's nearly86 billion neurons and over 500 trillion synapses. AI may be able to replicate the objective aspects of the red color—such as its wavelength of approximately 650 nanometers—but it will be more difficult to access my subjective redness. Consciousness is an emergent property of the specific biological matter of my brain and a silicon-based system, no matter how complex, will being able to will never be able to replicate them.

Both these hurdles lead to a third one. A vital property of consciousness is spontaneity, a freedom to choose my goals and objectives. This is central to the human experience. AI has so far achieved an excellent ability to follow commands. The autonomy that underlies spontaneity is what the Gita calls atman, an intangible 'life force', which is also the self-awareness behind all thought, intention and action. AI, as it currently exists, operates based on algorithms and data without conscious awareness or purposes of its own. To become truly sentient, AI still has far to go to achieve this spontaneity and freedom.

Let me conclude by returning to where I began: my ambivalent feelings of fascination and horror occasioned by the AI Gita project. While I am charmed by the wonderful possibilities of AI in teaching classics to the world, I am reminded once again of the slippery nature of my identity. Even before AI, I was troubled by the fragility of my 'self'. But in the busyness of day to day life, I tended to forget it. AI has now brought stage front that same anxiety. My wife has also changed her mind and wants me to drop the project. A dear friend too has been insistent, pushing me not to go ahead.

Re-reading the Gita, however, has made me re-think my values and the path to the good life. I spent a quarter of a century in the business world, where I was praised and rewarded for being acquisitive, sharp, and for making a profit. I did not particularly admire these qualities. Instead I valued kindness, openness, and generosity, which some of my colleagues considered to be traits of failure in the "real world". This contradiction always troubled me. The Gita has made me pause, making me aware of this paradox. What is at stake is our conception of success. The roots of the present crisis in public life around the world may also lie in this contradiction.

The Gita resides within the epic, Mahabharata, which has more than its share of continuing crises in public morality. There are constant parallels between the epic’s lament and the things we might say about our leaders today. The Gita's offers a different path to the good life. AI or no AI, I believe it is worth the effort to engage with it.

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Mr Das’s piece was Originally published by India House Foundation