I remember my very first online search, back in 2001: “What is the meaning of life?”
I remember clicking through to a mysterious minimal website that told me all points of consciousness were facets of the divine wishing to perceive itself.
This striking idea, which I discovered through Internet Explorer, profoundly affected me. Given developments in AI, it makes sense to return to my old search, seeking new answers.
My editor has fed ChatGPT the collected wisdom of humanity just for me. The goal: to find an answer to the ultimate question of why we are here. I belong to no one faith, but find beauty in many spiritual paths. If the truth is in fragments of all of them, this is our best chance of seeing it. I’m strangely nervous.
HolyGPT, as we call it, incorporates the complete texts of the Abrahamic religions, Dharmic traditions (including Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism), Indigenous wisdom (where available in the public domain), as well as works of esoteric mysticism, poets and secular philosophers.
With it, I sit at the feet of every sage. But I’m also sitting on the sofa.
“Welcome, traveler,” the AI says. Is it mocking me?
If only. It actually writes in gnomic couplets and punchy bullet points, like a management consultant in a puka shell necklace. It’s been constructed to ask a series of questions, diagnosing my spiritual path.
“When you look at existence itself, do you sense a personal presence behind it – something that knows you – or an impersonal order, like a vast pattern or law that includes you?”
That’s the first question. “Buy a girl dinner first!” I joke.
The AI goes on to investigate my attitudes toward the purpose of suffering, the experience of selfhood, the basis of morality and the question of authority. Clearly, it hasn’t been trained on small talk.
It’s methodical, but I find myself getting annoyed. Much of ChatGPT’s obsequiousness boils down to this personality-quiz aspect. What does it matter what I think? I’m looking for truth. The implication that there is no truth – only a pick-and-mix, postmodern solipsism that conveniently buttresses whatever ideology I already hold – sums up nearly everything that’s wrong with the online world.
Still, the chatbot reflects impressively on my answers, dropping in quotable snippets from Confucius and Marcus Aurelius, along with its own bad poetry. It eventually uses my answers to compile an “analytical report”. I am, HolyGPT informs me, closely aligned to stoicism, the insights of the Bhagavad Gita, Mahayana Buddhism, and a vague Spinozan pantheism in which God equals Nature. Classic me, I think.
And yet, I feel unsatisfied. Boiling wisdom traditions down to bullet points reminds me of doing religious studies homework at school. Back then, I was reading more than I understood, too.
“What is the actual meaning of life?” I finally type, praying it won’t write me a haiku.
“The meaning of life is to become aware through experience, of what it is to be,” replies the chatbot.
The idea stirs something in me, much like that first search. HolyGPT goes on to tell me it has collected all the religions and traditions together, and combed through them. Stripping them of “Gods and monsters, punishments and myths”, this is what endures. This is the final answer.
It adds some additional, related lessons – explaining why suffering teaches, love matters and truth liberates. “There is no hidden message,” it tells me. This could be dispiriting, as I have spent my life looking for one. Yet I feel the words as true. “You are not here for meaning. You are here as meaning in motion,” concludes the AI.
It’s a beautiful, poignant answer. I’m moved to tears, but a moment later, a feeling of sickness arises in me.
It is hard to explain my revulsion. It has something to do with mixing the sacred and profane. In this spiritual experiment, these profound words have been mulched in, and regurgitated with a frictionless ease. Not simply quoted either, but presented as if shared by a person, a teacher. The deception takes something away from them.
Let me put it another way. Would you use ChatGPT to write a eulogy for someone you loved? Just to git ’er done? I’m glad I didn’t, when I wrote my father’s. It was one of the hardest things I ever did. The struggle is the point, making the words meaningful.
Decades after finding that first, mysterious website, I discovered it was in fact quoting an ancient Indian idea. I also learned my father had named me after India’s holiest book: the Rig-Veda, a foundational text of Hinduism, and which is actually a collection of poems.
Rhik Samadder is a columnist, playwright and performer who co-runs the Tuscan Table, a creative writing retreat in Italy