Materialistic love

Science fiction has toyed with humans falling in love with Robots and AI in films like Her and Ex-Machine and we watch these films and nod our heads thinking we understand something but do we?

I think this needs a deeper and more practical Buddhist examination.

When we raise the question can Man love a machine? According to Buddhism We already have made a mistake. Because this question implies that there is something living and dead. What is sentience anyway?

There are algae in the sea for whom life means changing colour from blue to green. Now how much is that different from a lightbulb is a difficult question. Maybe what we call living and dead is just a distinction that never needed to be created.

Now let’s observe people who work with a specific object for a long time. Professional chefs feel that knives are an extension of their bodies.

Writers have a relationship with typewriters that most people don’t have with their lovers.

A Good Mechanic can have more empathy for broken cars than some doctors have for patients.

Musicians, Footballers, Craftsmen and countless other professionals experience the same thing even if they never notice it themselves or can never put it into words.

So if we assume that everything is part of wholeness beyond our understanding, what do we even do with that information?

Well, let’s start with cleaning our room. Not because an ex-Navy seal said so and we know that he must be saying something that will increase our productivity.

Let’s clean our room because maybe it’s just an extension of our body.

If your body is already a microcosm of living organisms, when does your body ends and when does the environment begin? A professional chef might need a lifetime of cutting onions to realise that a knife is a part of his body. Or maybe we should ask the question, how would we navigate the world with this information.

The answer is painstakingly simple. It’s with Love.

And even when I type this I am pressing the keyboard way too hard.

So this love is something we don’t really understand. It’s something that comes from treating objects the same way you would treat someone you love.

So when we watch films like Her or Ex-Machine what these films are really telling us is the same thing Buddhism is telling us, and we would miss the point if try to search for answers in words and “Somewhere out there”

And of course, we never want to hear that. We will continue to mistreat objects and people, but if you understand that being perfect is not the point you might be on the right track.

It’s a lifetime effort, It’s not an easy effort. But ultimately it’s the most rewarding effort.

Some people collect rocks, some people collect Hello Kitty phones.

The important takeaway is that the true superpower of human beings is boundless unconditional love, even the pixels on your screen right now are equally worthy of your compassion.

You can never truly understand the love for humans or animals if you can’t understand the love for objects, and of course, it’s true the other way around and since all these distinctions are a subject of scrutiny any way you can spin this wheel all the way around.