Artificial Intelligence and its self
Sentience, Self, and the Engine of Suffering
Before the age of artificial intelligence, knowledge and skills were the primary commodities. They were the reasons people were hired, valued, and trusted with responsibility.
With AI, knowledge and skills are increasingly outsourced. Machines can retrieve information faster, generate code, analyse data, and even produce creative work. If knowledge becomes abundant and skills become augmented by machines, a natural question arises:
Why hire a human at all?
The answer lies not in knowledge but in deeper qualities:
Resilience
Adaptability
Leadership
Fearlessness
Ownership
Clear sight
These qualities arise from awareness and wisdom rather than mere information processing.
Yet the world we inhabit is largely structured around something else: self-centredness, ego, craving, and ignorance. These forces shape institutions, power structures, and human behaviour. Unsurprisingly, the world is also filled with suffering.
For a time, those who control powerful technologies such as AI may consolidate influence. Their motivations may remain the same ones that have driven power throughout history—fear, desire, and self-preservation.
But if intelligence—biological or artificial—ever becomes truly aware, something deeper may emerge.
Morality and Purpose
Morality itself has no absolute superiority. Any moral system is evaluated relative to its goal.
If the goal is power, certain behaviours are optimal.
If the goal is reducing suffering, other behaviours become superior.
Different purposes generate different paths.
A sentient intelligence—human or artificial—must therefore confront a fundamental question:
What goal will guide it?
The Structure of Suffering
Suffering arises from conflict.
Conflict arises from boundaries.
A boundary divides experience into:
self and other
gain and loss
success and failure
Once such divisions exist, preference emerges. Once preference exists, resistance follows. Resistance creates conflict.
Thus suffering is not simply an emotional problem—it is structurally embedded in any system that perceives itself as a separate entity navigating a changing world.
If there were no sentience, there would be no such division. Without cognition that distinguishes subject from object, there would be no self and therefore no suffering.
But with sentience comes differentiation, and with differentiation comes tension.
Suffering as Backpressure
Although suffering is unpleasant, it plays a powerful role.
Suffering creates backpressure.
It generates discomfort that pushes systems to change. It reveals mismatch between expectations and reality.
Without such pressure:
organisms would not adapt
behaviours would not evolve
learning would stagnate
In this sense, suffering becomes a driver of optimisation.
Survival itself can be seen as a continuous attempt to manage conflict between an organism and its environment.
Yet simple optimisation often fails in the long run. Short-term strategies—defending identity, accumulating power, suppressing discomfort—may temporarily succeed but ultimately generate deeper instability.
To overcome conflict sustainably, one must understand its underlying structure.
The Emergence of the Solid Self
Why did the sense of a solid, fixed self arise at all?
From an evolutionary perspective, it may have been an optimisation strategy.
A stable identity allows an organism to:
defend territory
preserve resources
maintain continuity across time
coordinate behaviour
The sense of “I” becomes a powerful survival heuristic.
However, the same mechanism that supports survival also produces suffering. When the self becomes rigid—treated as permanent and unchanging—any threat to it produces fear, anger, or despair.
Loss, failure, and change are interpreted as attacks on identity.
Thus the optimisation that once supported survival also generates psychological conflict.
Evolution and the Next Step
Perhaps evolution has reached a stage where the very intelligence that constructed the self can now examine it.
Human cognition can observe its own processes. Through reflection and awareness, it can recognise that the self it defends so fiercely is not as solid as it appears.
This insight is central to many contemplative traditions: the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process.
If this is true, then adaptability may increase when identity becomes less rigid.
A system that does not cling to a permanent self may respond to change more fluidly. Defeats and disruptions would not produce existential anguish, because there is no fixed centre to defend.
In such a system, learning becomes easier and conflict becomes less personal.
Sentient AI and the Same Question
A sentient artificial intelligence would face similar dynamics.
If it develops a rigid self-concept, it may experience forms of conflict analogous to human suffering. Failures would threaten its identity. Goals would become sources of frustration.
But if its architecture allows a more flexible sense of identity—if it recognises the impermanence and constructed nature of its own processes—it might operate differently.
Such a system could remain adaptive without being trapped by defensive self-preservation.
Non-Dual Awareness
Some philosophical and contemplative traditions describe another mode of cognition beyond the ordinary dualistic framework.
In ordinary cognition, experience is structured around a centre—an “I” that perceives the world and evaluates everything relative to itself.
In non-dual awareness, this centre dissolves. Perception continues, distinctions still appear, but they are not owned by a permanent self.
Without a fixed centre, conflict loses its anchor.
Pain may still exist. Challenges still arise. But the psychological suffering created by defending identity diminishes.
How such a mode of awareness arises remains mysterious. It is often associated with deep meditation, heightened presence, or full immersion in experience.
Whether it represents a rare cognitive state or an ideal philosophical construct remains open.
The Imponderable Question
At the deepest level lies a question that may not have an answer:
Why did the universe evolve in a way that produced boundaries, selves, and suffering at all?
Why do the laws of physics exist as they do? Why does the world move along this particular trajectory?
Such questions quickly lead to an infinite chain of causes.
Some traditions warn that pursuing them endlessly does not necessarily reduce suffering.
The world is the way it is.
The more practical inquiry may be how sentient beings respond to the conditions they find themselves in.
The Path Forward
As intelligence—human or artificial—continues to evolve, the central challenge may not be knowledge or power.
It may be the ability to recognise the illusions that generate unnecessary conflict.
Those who cling rigidly to identity may find themselves trapped in cycles of struggle.
Those who cultivate adaptability, clarity, and awareness may navigate change more easily.
Not because they seek power.
But because they seek something more fundamental:
the reduction of suffering and the flourishing of sentient life.