shoshaku jushaku

I recently watched the Netflix documentary Unknown: Killer Robots, and came away upset and incredulous. I was astounded at the lack of basic logic in members of the AI community who couldn’t recognize that if AI can generate beneficial outcomes, it stands to reason it can also generate negative outcomes. Apply this to any use-case: pharmacology, defense, transportation, healthcare, etc. AI being, in its current state, a tool, then anywhere it’s possible for a human to act maliciously, it is ipso facto possible for a human to use AI to act maliciously. This principle should be well-understood as a fundamental axiom in technology by this point. 

Apart from a logical disconnect in the AI community at large, a lack of basic human empathy is also expressed from the proponents of AI military applications in the film. Euphemisms proliferate. “Saving lives”, “trading machines for lives”.

These statements can only be made in good faith when the person delivering them holds the fundamental presupposition that some lives deserve to be lost.

Seen from another lens, it gestures toward an overly-simplistic, binary understanding of life: there are good guys and bad guys. Good guys shouldn’t die and bad guys should. This ignores the complexity of the politico-economic factors that influence warfare, that define who is “good” and who is “bad” — why are the “bad guys” fighting? Why are the “good guys” fighting? What’s at the root? Who decides who is whom? In the film, these questions seem never to have been considered by proponents of AI weapons. 

Probably, they’ve been superficially considered and answered with a naive certainty that enables those who are developing technology with the potential to kill people en masse to sleep soundly at night.

I see the thematics of our particular evolution of capitalism expressed in the final leg of the documentary, where a U.S. Army Military Trade Expo is filmed. Generals strut around in full regalia, shopping for instruments of death like they’re at Target. Sweaty salesmen lure them in with promises of “providing whatever the customer needs to complete the mission”. Those who are pushing AI weapons are helping ensure “machines are doing the killing while humans supervise the kill chain.”

Kill chain? Complete the mission? Customer? 

These terms drip with the same abstract heartlessness of all bureaucratic corporate speak — euphemisms, mere identifiers that feign complexity of meaning while all really pointing to one thing: mechanisms enabling a producer to provide a consumer with a product for a specified outcome. 

That’s it. That’s what so much flashy corporate-bureaucratic language boils down to. It’s dehumanizing: people are understood primarily as profit-generating mechanisms, aimed at a very limited goal.

And now, with the advent of AI (which takes the rational function of the human being and expands it exponentially) human rationality itself is becoming largely obsolete from the perspective of business. 

Thus, dehumanization, a key theme of our version of capitalism which finds its roots in the language of corporate-bureaucratic speak is going to move from the realm of deceitful subjugation (come work for us! we love all our employees. we’ll replace you or lay you off as soon as it’s profitable!) to blatant elimination (why use people when the AI does it better?)

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Dehumanization has always been present in business, of course, down to the level of day-to-day language. Objective identifiers such as “customer”, “producer”, “client”, “competition”, these all constitute a linguistic structure that flattens the human being into binary functions. In more benign applications, this linguistic structure lubricates the bureaucratic decision-making mechanism. Consider that cutting hundreds to thousands of jobs is a lot easier when you’re cutting a “resource” instead of a human being with a life and family. When applied to the business of war, this ability to abstract the human being into a data point makes the decision to create, distribute, and utilize technology that kills human beings another simple calculus. The thinking works like this:

A “producer” wants to make money. They create a “product” for a “customer” using the least amount of labor possible in order to maximize profit from sales, and sell the product to the customer by out-innovating and out-marketing their “competition”, adopting persuasive language to display “responsiveness to their customer’s needs” and using the knowledge gleaned from that “responsiveness” to innovate the product in ways that “serve the customer”. These relationships can actually be diagrammed as a set of cloze statements:

[PRODUCER] creates [PRODUCT] for [CUSTOMER].

[CUSTOMER] purchases [PRODUCT]. 

[CUSTOMER] gives feedback to [PRODUCER].

[PRODUCER] responds to customer’s feedback.

[PRODUCER] attempts to out-innovate [COMPETITION].

[PRODUCER] recreates [PRODUCT] for [CONSUMER].

And the cycle continues. Once that abstract template of thought is constructed, anything can be slotted into it. This could, in fact, be a working construction of the essential capitalistic structure that applies broadly to every institution beneath capitalism: 

Ex 1: Apple

[Apple] creates [iPhones] for [users].

[Users] purchase [iPhones].

[Users] give feedback to [Apple].

[Apple] responds to [users’] feedback.

[Apple] attempts to out-innovate [Samsung, Google, etc].

[Apple] recreates [iPhone n] for [users].

Thus we arrive at iPhone 14.

Or:

Ex.2: Public Schooling

[Public schools] create [public education] for [taxpayers].

[Taxpayers] purchase [public education].

[Taxpayers] give feedback to [public schools].

[Public schools] respond to [taxpayers’] feedback.

[Public schools] attempt to out-innovate [other schools].

[Public schools] recreate [education] for [taxpayers].

Now, public school is an interesting case where the structure is itself being used as a euphemism. Rhetoric around public schools always states they are generating benefit for kids and society-at-large, but so long as they are funded by taxpayers who themselves receive income from a capitalistic system, at the end of the day they must generate benefit for the producers, i.e. the businesses. Follow the money. Hence our public schools shape effective bureaucrats and disciplinarians far more effectively than they do critical thinkers, artists, or humanitarians. They are a control structure that teaches people how to become control structures of themselves and the world around them, so they can click neatly into the broader structure of control that is the essence of our capitalistic, bureaucratic society.

What’s useful about the school example is that it shows how the capitalistic assumptions, rooted always in the profit motive, begin to break down the closer they come to generating human well-being. Thus the structures built from these assumptions have to become increasingly convoluted and deceptive to maintain the illusion that they’re working for the benefit of society-at-large. I would go so far as to say that the profit motive is mutually exclusive from the generation of well-being.

This is because the nature of generating well-being is in giving something; the nature of generating profit is taking something away.

Not that profit is inherently destructive. It just needs to be balanced with giving. One cannot take indefinitely without inevitable collapse. Unfortunately, our system doesn’t recognize profit as only one side of a necessary duality.

What’s pernicious about our current capitalistic system is that anyone born within it is so thoroughly immersed within all of its expressions from birth (hospitals, schools, entertainment, etc…every institution reflects, to some degree, the basic profit motive and its concomitant control structures) that it is taken not as an arbitrary mental construction, but an ontological presupposition. It rests below consciousness as “just the way things work”. And when that’s the case, people are necessarily perceived primarily as objects to click in and out of the prescribed slots of producer, product, consumer, and competition. 

Further, anything that furthers the profit-motive can click into those places, regardless of its ethicality. Here’s the AI Weapons model at work: 

AI Weapons

[AI weapons manufacturer] creates [weapons] for [military branches].

[Military branches] purchase [weapons].

[Military branches] give feedback to [AI weapons manufacturer].

[AI weapons manufacturer] responds to [military branches’] feedback.

[AI weapons manufacturer] attempts to out-innovate [other AI weapons manufacturers].

[AI weapons manufacturer] recreates [weapons] for [military branches].

Euphemistic phrases mentioned earlier such as “saving lives, supervising the kill chain, completing the mission” become selling points, and disguise the fact that all they’re really doing is making the most lethal weapons possible which ensure “good guys live and bad guys die”, because that’s what sells.

Profit is made. Producer and consumer celebrate. Maximum profit for minimal cost. And lives are saved along the way!

…except for the lives that are lost as a result of the product. 

But notice, effects of a product don’t factor into the basic thought structure — not unless it would somehow hinder the profit motive. Then they’re called “risks”, and these risks are managed to the extent it benefits the profit motive.

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breathe

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The union of AI weapons with the military-industrial complex may be the most perfected model of capitalism to date.

It exemplifies all of the thematics of capitalism: it’s profitable, it’s scalable, it’s effective at what it does — and incredibly dehumanizing.

It provides the most powerful mechanisms of control over human lives that can be framed within a bureaucratic business model.

Really, it embodies the logical endpoint of the dehumanizing presuppositions inherent in the capitalistic system: once dehumanization becomes normalized as the objectification of individuals within a system, it is only a matter of time until it becomes controlling. And since capitalism is not inherently balanced or sustainable, to continue to exist, it needs control. Because aggression is latent in the very act of control, it’s possible for that aggression to ferment, ultimately, into actual violence, as more and more control is demanded to maintain an unbalanced system. Then it can continue to take what it needs from the planet, from the disenfranchised, from whoever or whatever has something of perceived value, to allow the rotors to keep churning. 

And what is more expressive of control over a life, than the ability and willingness to take it?

I originally read the phrase, shoshaku jushaku, in Shinryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. In the Marrow of Zen section, he states:

When we reflect on what we are doing in our everyday life, we are always ashamed of ourselves. One of my students wrote to me saying, ‘You sent me a calendar, and I am trying to follow the good mottoes which appear on each page. But the year has hardly begun, and already I have failed!’ Dogen-zenji said, ‘Shoshaku jushaku.’ Shaku generally means ‘mistake’ or ‘wrong.’ Shoshaku jushaku means ‘to succeed wrong with wrong,’ or one continuous mistake. According to  Dogen one continuous mistake can also be Zen. A Zen master’s life could be said to be so many years of shoshaku jushaku. This means so many years of one single-minded effort.

The first time I read this, I was struck. How could a Zen master, someone who is supposed to have mastered the art of living, live a life in continual error? It seemed to be a contradiction.

Shoshaku jushaku has stuck with me over the years like a kind of koan, engendering deeper and deeper reflection into its meaning and relation to my and others’ lives.

My first way of relating to it was quite literal. I encountered it at a time in my life when I felt I was making constant mistakes. I found some validation in knowing that even Zen masters made mistakes — apparently they could live lives full of them. So even if all I did was make mistakes, so long as I acted with a kind of single-minded sincerity, it didn’t necessarily mean I was straying from the path. It gave me space to fail, or rather, gave me permission to give myself space to fail. Framed another way, it was the tinder that ignited a nascent sense of self-compassion.

As time progressed and self-compassion deepened, I began to question some of the assumptions in my initial reading of the phrase. What exactly is the art of living? What does it mean to “master” it? What exactly is the nature of a “mistake”? How do I relate to my “mistakes”?

I found that some things I deemed mistakes turned out, over time, to be excellent decisions. And some initially excellent decisions turned out to be terrible ones. Some decisions have oscillated between the mistake-excellence polarity multiple times. Further, whenever I feel I’ve made a mistake, it’s always afforded valuable learning, so can I really call it a mistake in the negative sense if it’s something that contributed to my growth as a person?

Resting with these questions, I began to sense that a leap was necessary. Mistake seems, in its colloquial sense, to be caught within a duality. Its opposite is success. So long as I was regarding mistakes from within the dualistic framework of MISTAKE vs SUCCESS, which in essence is a binary WRONG vs RIGHT structure, then there was no understanding of them as anything other than “something gone wrong”.

But wrong for what? If I’m deciding what a mistake is, I’m necessarily defining success, and how do I know I’m defining success accurately? The phenomenal world is everchanging. By what criteria do I generate a selection of the transient forms we call “phenomena” to attach a label of “success” to?

So I came to the understanding that attaching a binary understanding of success vs failure works really well for clearly defined, objective phenomena (I can succeed or fail at opening a jar) but breaks down rapidly the more complex the context becomes. What context is more complex than life itself?

We can always simplify a life context, of course, to assign the binary and give ourselves a sense of grounding. Success can be X amount of dollars in a bank account; it can be a healthy romantic relationship; it can be a wealth of experience and stories to tell. It can be any part of the human experience we decide to cordon off and regard as an object of value. Mistakes would then be actions that take us away from those perceived success outcomes.

But why put our lives, and by extension ourselves, into a box?

I think because it gives us a sense of grounding. Somewhere, deep down, we all have an innate sense of the vast mystery of existence. Its unpredictability, its volatility. There’s beauty to this — it’s the essence of freedom, expressed through the incessant transience of the phenomenal world. Everything is free to arise, free to pass away.

From an early age, we begin to close down that sense of vast mystery; concomitantly, modern society is full of products, institutions, and social norms that reinforce the act of closing down. We’re told to consume material things we don’t necessarily need, and learn to judge ourselves and others by the materials we possess; we find ourselves entrenched within institutions that govern the entirety of our lives, beginning with school, then expanding out to the workplace, the banking system, the political systems of our countries and the economic systems of the world at large.

Life increases exponentially in complexity, yet somehow becomes less and less profound. Put another way, it becomes incredibly circumscribed, obsessively so — everything is bounded and defined and cataloged and put into its proper place upon the shelf of the world as just another thing, like every other thing. And things beget things beget things. We seem to be able to go on forever transcribing the world this way, pretending at profundity through the mass of knowledge we’ve accumulated, but always feeling there’s something missing in the way we’re grasping everything.

It’s as though the depth of mysterious complexity we sense at the root of things is turned sideways, extending instead into an infinite but shallow material complexity that just obfuscates ourselves and the world around us, and acts as a tangible barrier that we must penetrate if we want to probe the depths of existence.

I think mistakes pierce the barrier, providing an opening into that mysterious depth. It’s when things go wrong, begin to fall apart, that we have a limit experience and have have no choice but to engage with the world beyond our circumscribed understanding, which manifests in one way as the mistake/success duality.

So we pick up. We move on. We make do.

And somehow, a richness sprouts from that mysterious void. We find ourselves floating, not as we would like to be, but as we are. Life is understood to be far vaster than we think it is. We know what it is to hurt, what it is to lose, and we see it happening to those around us. We know how they hurt. Perhaps we’re moved to heal what we can in ourselves and the world around us. For what can’t be fully healed, there’s healing in simply understanding.

Freed from the neurotic need to avoid mistakes, life becomes a vast possibility space. Something is always around the corner, waiting to be discovered. When we act, we disclose reality.

Maybe what we disclose brings pain — but maybe it doesn’t. How we engage with the reality of that duality without being trapped within it, is perhaps the essence of the art of living.

Shoshaku jushaku.

Earlier I stated my initial understanding of the phrase:

How could a Zen master, someone who is supposed to have mastered the art of living, live a life in continual error? It seemed to be a contradiction.

– me 20 paragraphs/6 years ago

What a mistake I made in that understanding. I had an ideal of success: a Zen master who had mastered the art of life such that they never made mistakes. But that is a sterile idea, a fiction. A Zen master is nothing special. They just see the success/failure duality clearly for what it is, and act with sincerity of intention.

So yes, the life of a Zen master can be a continuous mistake. Why couldn’t it be?

One single-minded effort can lead anywhere, after all, but it will inevitably lead us home.

I awake at 4am the morning of August 9th, 2023, burdened with a deep and familiar anxiety. As I slept, the “weirdness” of my life crept past the defenses of my consciousness, and waking in the midst of it I automatically relate to it with contention.

My memory ranges across the last four years of my life. They’ve been extraordinarily tumultuous. In many ways, I’m a completely different person than I was in 2019. In many ways, I’m completely the same. The weirdness of that paradox hovers over my brain; the weirdness of the unpredictable series of events, mundane and spectacular, which interwove into this exact paradox I call “myself” permeates the pillow, the sheets, my breath against the sheets.

Weirdness leaves no ground to stand upon. A lack of ground generates my anxiety. My anxiety has an intimate connection with my pain, draws it out: pain I carry, and pain I fear to carry.

Pain hurts. My habitual posture toward it is contentious; I deny it, fight it, ignore it, or try to solve my way out of it. These strategies work occasionally, but never permanently. All leave the pain right where it’s always been. Waiting. Wanting.

Denying it, fighting it, ignoring it, or concocting an ideal set of actions to work myself out of it, all are different configurations of the same basic posture: contention. Refusal to acknowledge the pain of my existence. Pain-begetting-pain-begetting-pain-begetting…

So that morning, I decide to let it be. People talk about letting the pain in, and I think I do that, but my felt experience is of the pain letting me in. I am stepping into a skin that trembles.

I curl into a ball. I shudder. I remember to breathe.

Faces, conversations, abandoned dreams, disappointments, pleasures, sublime moments — all weave together into a suffocating psychic fabric pulling taut around my head. I want to run. I want to scream. I want to cry. I want to sleep.

Instead I hold myself closer, relax into the fabric of my existence.

I am suspended. Groundless. Weird.

New shapes in the psychic fabric: I see that the times I’ve regressed back into my cocoon of limiting habits were always when I acted from contention. When I’ve grown, it’s been from rooting myself in the fecund earth of the pain I carry, standing upright, holding a raw heart to the open air.

Then I realize that pain is necessary. It’s simply a part of life. It is the characteristic of a raw heart, exposed to the world. By entering pain, I am exiting armor and constraint. I am finding freedom, and bravery.

Warmth begins to ebb.

Vision broadens, compassion deepens — I am present with the pain, and that connection perpetuates more presence until there is a profound sense of wholeness and sacredness to everything. Boundaries dissolve.

Everything is beauty flashing into existence.

—

I watched a cicada emerge from its cocoon this summer. It took its time circling a squat stone pillar again and again until it finally came to rest, anchored against the side. It pushed itself out slowly, gently. At one point, its new body was parallel to the ground, half in, half out of the cocoon. I held out my hands, afraid it would fall. It didn’t. I retracted my hands, and watched the wisdom of the world play out before my eyes.

It righted itself, revealed wispy translucent wings that fluttered in the breeze. Then it crawled out of its cocoon.

Metamorphosis. Release. Yet still, it couldn’t fly. Its wings hadn’t hardened. So it stayed next to the cocoon, waiting.

I found a lesson in this. We circle incessantly — often, we’re not sure what for, exactly, but still we circle. We do it until we find a place to anchor and rest, either by choice or by force. Latent here is the possibility of transcendence. Slowly, steadily, we can grow out of our egoic shell, the function of which is, fundamentally, protective; the structure of which is, necessarily, bureaucratic. A central self, constituted of arbitrary mental processes formed around intentional ends, always in service of enhancing and protecting its envisioned locus of control. Gain territory, defend. Gain territory, defend. Lose territory, bemoan. Gain territory again, and thus the cycle perpetuates.

When looked at honestly, it is the same as all bureaucracy: an arbitrary construction. All process, no substance. A constant breathless effort to keep inflating an imaginary balloon. A confusion of speed for efficiency, output for efficacy, and aggression for power.

Release takes time. To aggress is to regress. It takes gentle, consistent effort. Then it takes the effort to release effort. Then it takes simply being present, to let be.

Awareness dawns. The egoic bureaucracy knows so little, assumes so much, fears even more. One becomes more and more interested in the world outside of it.

Finally, one becomes a mirror.

—

Warmth ebbs.

Curled into a ball, I hug myself closer. I realize ego is not to be reviled. The cicada didn’t hate its cocoon. It rested beside it. Perhaps it was honoring it. After all, it is a paradox: the cocoon both was and wasn’t itself.

Release is simultaneously complex and simple. Complexity lies in the infinite mutability and adaptability of the egoic structure; simplicity, in the dignity of being. Letting be collapses the complexity of the ego down into a single point, the present, and that focused energy drives the growth of the spirit which hatches forth from the ego, like the cicada from the cocoon.

Complexity begins with the unexamined belief in duality.

Even one simple duality hinders the natural release process, and can be the root of infinite complexity. If there can be one, there can be two. Two, then, three. Thus we end up at ten thousand things. Yet paradoxically, assuming one simple duality, becoming lost amidst infinite complexity, also is the natural release process.

There is beauty to this, but its nature must be understood.

The duality with which I’ve always persisted is Me vs Pain. Recognizing the connected nature of their separateness, I am able to enter into the pain, and metamorphose into a being who stands upright, brokenhearted, and profoundly in love with the world.

Today, I marveled at a yellow dragonfruit in Kroger.