Beyond the Goal

At the moment, I’m drinking a genuine sugar cane Moxie from a glass shaped like a skull. Right now, it functions as a cup, but it could just as easily be a pencil holder. Before this, its constituent materials were probably sand or silica, with their own geological histories. Whatever it is now, the stuff it’s made from once existed in entirely different forms.

What I want from something helps determine what that something represents to me. Currently, it’s “cup.” But this isn’t some intrinsic quality possessed by the object. Still, it’s a perfectly good description arising from its characteristics, my purposes and the situation. As I sip this refreshing Moxie, the glass skull is doing a great job being a cup.

We perform this kind of mental sorting constantly and mostly unconsciously, but teaching a machine to do it presents an interesting conundrum. Like humans, an artificial agent can’t treat every detail in an environment as equally important. Context is key. Tell a machine to find something that can hold Moxie and the skull is a mug. Tell it to identify skulls and its shape becomes relevant; tell it to sort recyclables and suddenly it matters that it’s glass. The object hasn’t changed, but the goal has.

I recently came across a paper by Nadav Amir, Stas Tiomkin and Angela Langdon called “Goals and the Structure of Experience,” published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. The authors challenge the assumption that we first figure out what something is and then decide whether it matters. In actuality, what we’re trying to accomplish helps determine how we organize experience. This is also true of machine learning.

The authors draw from Dharmakīrti, an influential Indian Buddhist philosopher who lived roughly 1,400 years ago and wrote about how we know and categorize things. The core concept is apoha, typically translated as “exclusion.” Basically, a category like “cup” doesn’t require every vessel to share some essential “cupness.” Different objects can count as cups when what matters is their capacity to hold a drink.

The researchers call these goal-dependent categories “telic states,” grouping together experiences whose differences don’t matter for achieving a particular goal. Change the goal, however, and something previously irrelevant can suddenly become important.

So far, I’ve been talking about little goals. Mahayana Buddhism—which includes Zen, Himalayan Buddhism, Chinese Buddhism, and many other schools and lineages—orients itself toward something much more encompassing: a goal that eventually isn’t a goal at all.

That is bodhicitta, the “mind of awakening,” which includes both the compassionate intention to attain buddhahood for the benefit of all beings and, ultimately, the wisdom that recognizes the nature of reality.

Ordinary experience is heavily organized around me, me, me. Bodhicitta encourages a different mindset. A difficult person can become a suffering being, an inconvenience an occasion for patience, and something I possess an opportunity for generosity.

Mahayana Buddhism includes teachings on the “two accumulations”: merit and wisdom. Merit is cultivated through generosity, ethical conduct, patience, contemplation, compassion and so forth. Over time, these practices serve to enact an orientation toward bodhicitta.

Yet if that were the whole story, Mahayana would simply replace selfish goals with virtuous ones. Which is nice, but not necessarily liberating. The second accumulation, wisdom, disrupts any tendency to make this orientation solid. Wisdom recognizes emptiness: things don’t possess the independent identities we instinctively attribute to them, but arise through causes, conditions and relationships. Mahayana applies this scrutiny to the practitioner, the beings benefitted, and even awakening itself.

The traditional teaching of the “purity of the three spheres” makes this especially clear. In an act of generosity, there is conventionally a giver, a gift and a recipient. Wisdom recognizes that none of these possess a fixed, independent identity, and yet the gift is still given. Merit is the giving; wisdom is the recognition of the emptiness of giver, gift and recipient. Both accumulations are present within the same action.

Without wisdom, merit can become another project of self-construction: I’m compassionate, I’m accumulating, I’m progressing. Without merit, wisdom can be sterile and detached from suffering. Here, intent matters enormously, though it is not reified.

If goals help determine which distinctions become meaningful, transforming intelligence may require more than simply choosing better ones. Mahayana Buddhism offers another possibility: establishing the most expansive purpose imaginable while refusing to make even that purpose absolute.

Just like the cup. Currently, it holds Moxie; later, it could hold pencils. Right now the ice is melting, so I’d better take a sip.