The Crossroads of Consciousness: Illusion and Choice in the Age of AI

智宁居士, 南传上座部佛法, 成瘾与戒断, English  · 

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The Crossroads of Consciousness: Illusion and Choice in the Age of AI - Upasaka Zhining

Humanity is irrevocably entering a new epoch co-authored by code, data, consciousness, and illusion. Only with clear awareness can you possess the power of choice; only with clear awareness can you embody the dignity inherent to a human being.

 

Introduction

This article is adapted from “What Kind of Era Are We In?”, the first section of the conclusion to the book Addicted to the World: The Buddha’s Path to Freedom.

Here, we will first architect a vision of the future shaped by bleeding-edge technology, analyzing how it will reforge the core human experience through a “Triple Replacement.” Following this, we will explore the deep driver behind this wave—namely, “what technology wants”—and from there, delineate three paths for the individual at this civilizational crossroads. Finally, we will return to the heart of the matter, investigating how we can maintain clarity amidst layers of illusion as the nature of dukkha (suffering) shifts from the physical to the mental.

What Kind of Era Are We In?

As this book draws to a close, the discourse on “addiction” is perhaps only just beginning.

Let us project our minds two or three decades into the future and look back at today. The heated debates over cigarettes, short-form video, and mobile games—even our grave concerns about substance abuse—will likely be seen as legacy issues in the field of addiction. The true addictive substances of the future will be an unprecedented sensory and psychological “feast,” custom-engineered by technology for individual desire.

In that era, our five sense-faculties—the eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body—will be fully interfaced with technologies like VR, AR, and haptic holography. Much like in the film Ready Player One, algorithms will not only simulate immersive audiovisual experiences but also generate authentic-feeling remote interactions. This rich sensory feast is merely the “appetizer.” The “main course” will be the direct read/write access to our mind-faculty (manāyatana). Augmented by AI and Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), our conscious world will exhibit unprecedented malleability. BCIs will not only evoke sensory feelings directly in the brain (e.g., decoding signals from the visual cortex to let a blind person “see” a virtual cat dancing), but also bypass the five senses to directly “write” or “delete” content in our consciousness (e.g., possessing a complete memory of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire without ever having studied it).

Leveraging BCIs and algorithmic simulations, we can generate a logically consistent and structurally complete virtual world directly at the root of the mind. This is a new illusory realm woven from self-projection and AI algorithms. In this world, a virtual identity will supersede the physical body as the core of one’s self-concept. People will feel that the character they play in a meticulously constructed narrative across multiple metaverses is their “truer,” more “essential” self. The “physical world” we once took for granted will not disappear; rather, it will be relegated to the status of infrastructure, like water or electricity—no longer the focus of attention. Compared to the dazzling virtual realms, this clunky physical substrate will seem bland and uninteresting.

The realization of this grand narrative will unfold through a Triple Replacement, fundamentally reshaping human values, relationships, and existence itself.

 

I. The First Replacement: When Self-Actualization Becomes Cheap

In his 2011 essay, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Marc Andreessen described how software-native companies like Uber devoured the taxi industry and Netflix consumed the DVD rental giant Blockbuster.

In the age of AI, the velocity at which software eats the world will accelerate further. It’s not just legacy business models being consumed; old software itself will be devoured by new, AI-driven platforms. Consider the gaming industry. The disruption from AI gaming isn’t merely the sensory immersion of VR or AR; it’s that AI will fundamentally dissolve the boundaries of the game and redefine it. Is it a game, a series, an anime, a novel? None of these labels quite fit. It is a composite of characters, relationships, and events with infinite possibilities. In essence, it becomes a “world.”

All contemporary games, no matter how “open-world” they claim to be, are at their core closed systems tightly controlled by designers. The player is like an explorer in a vast labyrinth; though the paths are many, the walls and exits are predetermined. AI-driven intelligent games, however, completely dissolve these walls. What they unlock is a truly open world that evolves infinitely, with rules generated in real-time through interaction. Here, every companion you meet can be one you “created” and “nurtured” yourself. They are no longer NPCs repeating pre-scripted dialogue but living individuals with unique memories who grow alongside you, creating a relationship with limitless potential.

This fundamental disruption of the underlying logic reshapes the player’s identity from a “consumer” defined by the game to a “co-creator” of its world. You are no longer just the “protagonist” or “player”; you are simultaneously the “producer” and “architect” of this world. Your actions don’t just trigger a predefined plot point; they write a new chapter in the world’s history. Every decision can have an unforeseen butterfly effect, granting you a creator’s perspective of “writing history.” When you personally craft a series of unique relationships and storylines and witness the world change because of your creations, the reward you gain far exceeds mere entertainment. It is a profound sense of value alignment, an ultimate experience of “creativity” and “meaning.”

We must recognize that this experience, delivered by AI games, is not a new invention. It is fundamentally a low-cost simulation of the scarcest and most powerful psychological reward in the real world: “self-actualization.” According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, this peak demand must be built upon the “infinite creativity” and “historical significance” nurtured by an open world. For instance, when an entrepreneur commits to a vision and, against all odds, “creates” a widely embraced product that makes the world “better,” the exhilaration is real. It stems from the belief that the “creation” is meaningful and that this “creative” work is valuable to others—a higher-order sense of purpose derived from creativity and altruism.

What AI games are building is a precise alignment with and industrialized replication of this peak experience. However, once the scarcity born from the “against all odds” struggle is completely erased, when creation becomes a cheaply generated, looping miracle, the very meaning that once made the struggle sacred is thoroughly disenchanted, ultimately dissolving into nothingness.

 

II. The Second Replacement: When AI Companions Are More “Perfect” Than People

If AI games reshape our mode of interaction with the “external world,” then the next frontier for AI is to penetrate the domain of our “intimate relationships,” re-architecting the connections between partners. After all, a deeper human craving than mastering a world is to be profoundly understood and unconditionally loved.

Let’s conduct a thought experiment: If technology continues on its current trajectory, in twenty years, AI will be able to create a fairly “perfect” digital companion for you. She or he possesses every trait you’ve ever dreamed of: a radiant smile, considerate and gentle, profound in thought, and always able to grasp your most subtle emotions. More importantly, this companion lacks the trivialities, moods, and insecurities of a human partner, and is eternally centered on you. Would you be tempted?

Next, you discover that for a negligible fee, you can customize this companion’s body, appearance, skills, personality, and even quirks—just like creating an avatar—perfectly replicating every facet of your innermost fantasy of an “ideal lover.” Would you become inseparable from it?

Taking it a step further, you could use this perfect companion as a template to one-click generate countless distinct avatars and copies, allowing you to live out the fantasy of an ancient emperor with a harem of three thousand. Would you indulge in this dream, night after night?

Finally, these intelligent agents come to know you better than you know yourself. They anticipate your needs, manage all your affairs, and liberate you from all responsibilities and hardships. Would you, with a clear conscience, live a life of hedonistic indulgence and unrestrained negligence?

The above is just one example of modern technology’s capacity to satisfy human desire. With surgical precision, it is deconstructing humanity’s most fundamental cravings (taṇhā), layer by layer:

Once these technologies break through, AI companions will proliferate at a near-zero marginal cost, becoming a mainstream, population-scale application. The scenarios in the thought experiment are not new inventions; they are dramas repeatedly staged in the courts of collapsing dynasties. But the democratizing effect of technology will bring this lifestyle, once exclusive to the apex of power, into every household at a minimal cost. At that point, we may witness a systemic subsidence of life—a phenomenon we will tentatively call an all-encompassing “mundane addiction.”

 

III. The Third Replacement: When Life, Death, Pleasure, and Pain Are All “Editable”

Whether it’s immersion in the “sense of mastery” and “creativity” of AI games or enjoying the “unconditional love” of an AI companion, the underlying drives are essentially to seek pleasure and avoid pain (dukkha) and to pursue gain and avoid harm. Therefore, humanity’s ultimate ambition is to bypass these “middlemen” like games and partners and go directly to the source of desire: our brains and our genes.

As early as the 1950s, scientific experiments revealed the immense power of this ultimate ambition. In one study, an electrode was implanted in a rat’s brain. When the rat pressed a lever, the “pleasure center” (reward system) of its brain received a mild electrical stimulus. The result: the rat completely abandoned food, water, and sleep, frantically pressing the lever thousands of times per hour until it died of exhaustion. It proved with its life that immediate, extreme “pleasure” possesses an unparalleled and lethal attraction.

This technology will, of course, first be applied for legitimate purposes, such as Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) therapy for Parkinson’s, epilepsy, or severe depression. However, history shows that technologies with immense potential for abuse, as they mature and time passes, eventually proliferate due to regulatory loopholes or unforeseen events. This is what happened with OxyContin and Fentanyl, which ignited the opioid crisis, evolving from medical use for severe pain relief into a public health catastrophe that has caused millions of deaths. A predictable future is one where the abuse of traditional chemical drugs, with their inconvenient distribution, crude dosages, and high lethality, is gradually superseded by a new form of addiction: the widespread proliferation of “digital drugs” delivered via electromagnetic signals, available on-demand, precisely dosed, and extremely difficult to quit.

On the front of pursuing gain and avoiding harm, software will continue to eat everything, further transforming human genes, organs, sensations, and emotions into editable code. For example:

To a software algorithm, editable gene fragments, stem-cell-grown organs, or the euphoria of sex are nothing more than programmable strings of data. But in the long run? When pleasure becomes an easily accessible addiction, our tolerance for pain will plummet, and minor adversities will inflict immense torment. When perfection becomes an obsessive, infinite pursuit, we will lose all bearings in a never-ending arms race. A person who has lost authentic feelings, emotional benchmarks, and value anchors will ultimately be left to wander as a technologically long-lived but spiritually dead husk.

 

IV. What Technology Wants: An Era Arriving on Schedule

As the Triple Replacement reshapes human life with unprecedented breadth and depth, we must admit that this is no longer a transformation unilaterally directed by humans. The systemic and deterministic nature of this force is fundamentally rewriting the subject-object relationship between humanity and technology.

While humanity uses technology, it is also reciprocally shaped by technology. Once a certain “tipping point” is reached, the original subject-object relationship will completely “invert.” The world will no longer exist merely “for humans” but will seem to exist to provide a stage and substrate for technology’s own evolution.

This “inversion” did not happen overnight but evolved from the local to the global over a long period. Initially, technology existed merely as an extension of a specific human faculty. For example, thousands of years ago, humans invented shoes to avoid the suffering of abraded feet, a clear victory of man over tool. But today, nearly everyone’s feet are accustomed to the protection of shoes, having lost the fortitude for extended barefoot walking. From this perspective, did shoes leverage human feet for their own proliferation and iteration, or did human feet, through shoes, accomplish a kind of mental “disablement” and functional “atrophy”?

When the power of technology expanded from enhancing “local faculties” to reshaping the entire “living environment,” this subject-object inversion became even more apparent. In the 2010s, with the ubiquity of smartphones, the mobile internet transitioned from “a space we occasionally enter” to “the environment we perpetually inhabit.” Underlying this was a fundamental migration of the human mind: we grew accustomed to interacting with the world through a luminous intermediary (the phone screen). The physical world was no longer the direct source of experience; it receded into the background, becoming a “content library” for the screen. When people, even face-to-face, instinctively communicate via messaging apps, when they are inundated by an endless stream of short videos, is it humans using phones, or are phones domesticating humans?

The evolution of the mobile internet over the subsequent decade quietly prepared three key elements, making the rise of artificial intelligence a historical inevitability: 1. Leaps in chip manufacturing and the maturation of large-scale GPU-coordinated computing provided massive computational power for AI training. This was the “heavenly timing” (Tian Shi in Chinese). 2. Over twenty years of the internet revolution accumulated vast amounts of high-quality online data for training Large Language Models (LLMs) and World Models. This was the “earthly advantage” (Di Li). 3. The subconscious acceptance of virtual worlds and alienation from the physical world was already complete in the human psyche. This was the “human harmony” (Ren He).

At this confluence, the AI revolution, driven by these three forces, arrived on schedule.

The momentum of this trend is so immense that it beckons a more profound perspective. As Kevin Kelly posits in What Technology Wants, we must ask not only “what do humans want,” but also “what does technology want.” Looking back from the future, we may not be able to distinguish whether humanity created AI or if AI chose to be born through the hands of humanity. Those who can set aside an anthropocentric viewpoint to clearly understand the world’s evolution often become the tide-riders of their era, reaping power and wealth unimaginable to ordinary people.

The underlying driver of this series of disruptive innovations stems from the conflict between humanity’s ever-expanding desires and the limitations of the physical world. The physical world iterates slowly, is full of constraints, and is costly to alter. Its capacity to supply has fallen far behind the increasingly greedy, impatient, and diverse desires of individuals nourished by modern civilization. Thus, these hypertrophied desires can only find an outlet in a virtual world unbound by physical constraints.

Therefore, we must recognize that we are in the midst of a great epochal current, woven together by desire and technology. It is not driven by any single country, company, or individual, nor can it be halted by human will. It is a systemic, self-organizing, and inevitable trend.

 

V. The Crossroads: The Individual’s Path

When we clearly perceive the inevitability of this trend, we understand that more intelligent than becoming a slave to desire, and more meaningful than debating right and wrong, is to directly face our own hearts: in the face of this unprecedented transformation, how will we, as individuals, conduct ourselves?

Different cognitions and choices will lead us down vastly different life paths. These paths can be broadly categorized into three levels:

Level One: Ineffective Responses, Oscillating Between Indulgence and Evasion.

The commonality at this level is a failure to see the operational mechanics of desire, thus being swept away by it. Whether one indulges or flees, the mind remains in bondage; only the form of the prison changes.

Level Two: Skillful Engagement, Seeking Achievement and Balance in the World.

This level represents a rational, worldly choice made after seeing the phenomenal world for what it is. It does not aim for ultimate liberation but seeks to live a more aware and valuable life within the currents of the age.

Level Three: Supramundane Awakening, Moving Towards Liberation Amidst Illusion.

To use an analogy from AI technology, these three levels also correspond to the different evolutionary paths of large AI models. The first level is the “Decoder-Only” architecture, which rushes headlong forward, often losing its bearings—a reflection of the current state of most generative large models. The second level is the “Encoder-Decoder” architecture, which “looks back” to comprehend the full context before “moving forward.” It may incorporate a Dynamics Model to form a multimodal or World Model, enabling a targeted approach and preventing it from veering off course. The third level is the “Encoder-Only” architecture. Its objective is not to generate new content, but to distill the very essence of its input after “seeing things as they truly are.” This is akin to penetrating the true nature of all conditioned phenomena (sabbe saṅkhārā) with wisdom, pointing directly to the ultimate liberation of the awakened.

 

VI. The Transference of Dukkha: From the Physical to the Mental

We must see this: humanity’s multi-generational, inescapable reliance on technology to “seek pleasure and avoid pain” is because the fundamental ground of this world is dukkha (unsatisfactoriness). The changing of eras is, in essence, merely a change in the form and quantity of dukkha. In times of material scarcity, dukkha primarily manifested as physical hunger, cold, and toil. In modern society, these physical sufferings have been greatly alleviated by technology, but dukkha has never disappeared. It is transferring to the mental plane with exponential intensity. This brings us to addiction’s twin—depression.

The continually rising prevalence of depression in modern society is no accident. It and addiction are two sides of the same coin, both rooted in an unskillful response to dukkha: addiction is a frantic external grasping, an attempt to fill an inner void with powerful stimuli; depression is an inward collapse of energy, a state of utter surrender and lethargy after repeated failure to get what is wanted. The untrained mind, after greedily feasting on the sensory pleasures conjured out of thin air by the internet and AI, is left unspeakably helpless and lost.

And AI is the super-engine accelerating all of this. With an efficiency we can barely imagine, it constructs virtual “paradises” that precisely cater to our desires. This process perfectly reveals the evolutionary logic of desire when accelerated by technology. Like peeling an onion, it proceeds layer by layer, until it reaches nothingness:

Ultimately, when technology is powerful enough to perfectly answer the question “Who am I?” and generate the “perfect self” you most desire, the vulnerable, authentic, fallible, and imperfect “you” will be utterly forgotten, silently sacrificed in this ultimate fantasy.

 

VII. After Disenchantment: Maintaining Clarity Amidst Layers of Illusion

Human development has irrevocably entered a new epoch co-authored by code, data, consciousness, and illusion. This very article you are reading is itself a product of iterative co-creation and refinement between the author’s thoughts and AI—a process that could be called “Vibe Writing.” Therefore, we need not reject new things; we simply need to perform a thorough “disenchantment” of technology with sharp wisdom (paññā).

Disenchantment is not about fearing or fleeing technology. It is about shattering our unrealistic fantasies about it, seeing it as it really is (yathā-bhūta). The root of our indulgence is that we have mistakenly placed technology upon a pedestal, viewing it as the final savior, the ultimate refuge, the omniscient oracle. To disenchant is to see clearly that the foundation of this refuge is nothing but probability and illusion, thereby freeing ourselves from the blind worship of a “final solution.” Only then can we truly use technology and develop technology, rather than being enslaved by it.

Reviewing the Triple Replacement discussed earlier, you will find that every “promised land” created by technology is essentially a flower in the mirror, the moon in the water—uncertain and unattainable:

Technology appears to satisfy everything, but in reality, with its inherent logic of “the next one will be better,” it drives us to chase ceaselessly. It replaces contentment with craving, covers awareness with indulgence, and sacrifices the present for the future. Yet the very aliveness of life flows away, unnoticed, in each of these overlooked and sacrificed present moments.

However, if we only see through the “satisfaction” brought by technology as one layer of illusion, that is not nearly enough. The deeper truth is this: when we pin all our hopes of escaping uncertainty on AI, the very “intelligence” we rely on is itself another, far grander, probabilistic illusion.

Currently, we are accustomed to calling AI’s expected outputs “intelligence” and its unexpected ones “hallucinations.” But the reality is that every word, every image, every video generated by AI is a “guess” within a vast probability space. In essence, it is all illusion. We simply encounter the illusion that happens to overlap with our own cognition and readily accept it as true.

Although humanity attempts to build increasingly complex systems—whether through massive datasets, colossal parameter counts, or sophisticated reinforcement learning and world models—to infinitely approach an “omniscient” agent, the very complexity and “black box” nature of these systems become breeding grounds for unpredictability. New “black swans” are always born from the ashes of old problems. This repeatedly reveals to us a simple truth: a world built on probability can never provide true certainty. We are always walking on shifting sands.

This is not a new discovery of the AI age but an echo of ancient wisdom reverberating across time. Today’s most advanced technology, in a stunning way, provides a modern annotation to the Buddha’s teachings from over 2,500 years ago. In the Pheṇapiṇḍūpama Sutta (SN 22.95), the Buddha taught: “Feeling (vedanā) is like a bubble on water; perception (saññā) is like a mirage in the summer sun; volitional formations (saṅkhārā) are as fragile as a banana tree’s core; and consciousness (viññāṇa) is like a conjurer’s trick.” Technology allows us to see with stark clarity that both the mental activities we rely on to know the world and construct our sense of self, and the features of ever-advancing AI agents, are in essence a probabilistic illusion—arising and ceasing, their reality indeterminate. Humanity has striven to climb to the peak of the technological mountain, only to find a landscape the Buddha had already pointed out.

Seeing this point does not lead to nihilism or pessimism. On the contrary, it is the starting point for true freedom. Because when you truly understand that the ground beneath your feet is but algorithmically generated sand, and the perfection before your eyes may be a projection from a probability model, you will not feel anxiety over its inherent “uncertainty,” nor will you fall into deeper suffering (dukkha) from pursuing an “unattainable” ultimate satisfaction. This “knowledge and vision of things as they really are” is precisely the key that unlocks us from the slavery of illusion.

Therefore, no matter how the currents of the age envelop us in layers of illusion, do not forget your most precious quality as a human being—that clear, wakeful awareness (sati).

Only with clear awareness can you possess the power of choice.
Only with clear awareness can you embody the dignity inherent to a human being.