Artful rather than artificial – On yogic learning and human intelligence

Artful rather than artificial – Use it or lose it

On yogic learning and human intelligence

On human intelligences, learning and AI, via basketball and the ego-shredding and re-evaluating process of yoga practice.

As a teenager I was very into basketball. This was during the period of Michael Jordan’s first three championships and during the playoffs, school friends who had satellite TV would record the Chicago Bulls matches so I could watch them on video.
In the last decade I developed a habit I have not yet managed to completely kick, of sometimes watching not particularly useful content on youtube. During the NBA playoffs, I might watch some of the 10 minute summary videos of playoff games. So it was this last year, and I must have spent almost an hour of my life watching the recap videos of the Pacers-Thunder finals. This series went to a final game seven, both teams managing to dominate in some matches, both teams impressive in their depth. The game seven showdown was rather marred by the Pacers’ top player going down injured in the first quarter, after starting the match confidently and authoritatively. He went down with one of the athlete’s worst nightmare injuries – a torn achilles tendon…
Heartbreak for the player – Tyrese Haliburton – and heartbreak for the Indiana fans. And consternation for some of the commentators. This was not an isolated incident in the NBA. In recent years, a string of top players have suffered the same non-contact injury that has drastically interrupted their career.
Obviously, playing elite sports subjects the body to extraordinary demands. One might even say that one of the qualifying characteristics of those who make it to the professional ranks is that they are all extraordinary physical freaks, injuries accounting for a significant part of the selection process through the junior ranks, but even the most physically gifted are human and subject to injury.
Sure, but why all of a sudden this explosion in achilles injuries?
Some suggest it’s the shoes, more players now opting for low cut styles. Others contend that the game is faster. I’m not convinced that either of these observations account for it. An argument I find more persuasive is that this is probably a manifestation of use it or lose it, the problem of outsourcing and the potential scourge of artificial intelligence.
What do I mean?
Well, starting with use it or lose it and the example of physical robustness.
Being born in the 1970s it is striking how the humans I am surrounded by now often look less healthy and physically capable than when I was a child last century.
I remember on holidays being surrounded by adults who could throw and catch and enjoy for example a game of rounders or some ‘potted sports’ family competition with three-legged, or even five or seven legged races, wheelbarrow races and such. The only time I saw obese people was in TV documentaries about the rise of obesity in the US.
A couple of years ago, some forty years later, I was at the beach in Scarborough and saw that the majority of people looked overweight and physically incapable, not even able to walk well.

Back when growing up in the 70s – 90s, one of the worst punishments for a young boy was to be grounded or more precisely kept inside. Why? Because for many of us, our preferred activities all involved running around outside, playing sports and games, roaming around the countryside, climbing trees and stacks of haybales, building dens, throwing and kicking balls around, sometimes throwing and kicking each other around. We’d be outside, moving, a lot of the time. When I was at school, me and my friends would constantly be jumping around the corridors, racing up and down stairs three at a time. School breaks were spent for the most part playing sports, and running around. Those of us who liked sports usually played several of them. ‘Training’, even when sport specific, was still fairly general. Even if we did certain types of drill at basketball, rubgy or football practice, they usually had a fairly high crossover to other activities and could easily be part of a general physical capacity training regime. Most of the training was playing. When I was playing a lot of basketball, a two hour session with my friends would likely consist of about twenty minutes of warming up with layup lines, shooting games and three on two two on one up and down the court before we would scrimmage, ie run nonstop, for the rest of the session. And then run and skip and bounce home on foot, or perhaps by bicycle.
Consequently, we were pretty conditioned. We might not have looked like Olympians, and we might not have had gymbods, but we were all round capable, of running and jumping for hours, and when I worked in the summers during university I was capable of doing manual work all day long, with just a homemade sandwich and a couple of fruits for vittles, and then going home and doing press ups, sit ups, leg raises and some stretching to ‘ease out’ my body in the evening.
These days though, keeping a teenager inside might not even register as a punishment. Younger people seem a lot more sedentary than even just a generation ago.
When considering the rash of non-contact injuries in professional basketball, some of the commentators, former elite players themselves, point out that the modern professional athletes, extraordinarily gifted as they may be, are just not all round conditioned in the way of their forebears.
Apparently it’s the same in the military. Only a few decades back, the intake, even if they were scrawny and malnourished, even if they weren’t the most sporty or coordinated, all came in with a work capacity that allowed for an intensity of training that these days apparently just breaks people…

Use it or lose it.
Physically, we have outsourced so much activity. As a child, in between playing sports and the torture of sitting in chairs at school, I used to help my parents in the garden, I used to carry grocery shopping back from town. When I wanted money to buy a tennis racket I took on a newspaper round and would spend summer evenings running aroung the neighbourhood delivering to 300 houses. And then I’d go and hit, chase, dribble, shoot the ball…
These days I don’t see so many people growing their own food. In the town I grew up in, forty years ago in daylight hours there were almost always kids playing on the streets, on the playing fields, and on the school tennis courts. Now, I hardly ever see that. We have outsourced so much of our physical intelligence and this comes with some serious cost.

Now, we are being invited to outsource swathes more of our intelligence with the incoming deluge of AI. Someone recently told me that a friend of hers had consulted chatGPT for marital advice… and been quite impressed with the ‘feedback’.
Apparently, some copywriting jobs are now defunct because AI can just do it better…
And here I am, writing by myself, with my human intelligence, spending my time doing a task that I could outsource. ‘Hey chapGPT, write me an engaging and thought-stimulating article about the perils of outsourcing written creative work to AI’. Apparently it’s as easy as that. I haven’t tried. And I don’t want to.
Some might say I’m a foolish luddite and a ‘climate change denier’ in that I am denying the changing climate of the intellectual space…
Well, I don’t deny that AI can be useful. Tools can be useful yet also detrimental.
Am I using it, or is it using me?
I mentioned my youtube habit. I don’t think I’m a particularly bad case. I happily go days at a stretch offline and would gladly stay offline longer if it were practical in terms of my work. But in my engagement with ‘the algorithm’, it is glaringly obvious how the algorithm seeks to use me, to draw me in, to hijack my mind, capture my attention and so imprison me in a bunker of my own preferences… a prison that indulges my weaknesses… one that’s designed for me to not even realise it is entrapping me, deadening my creativity, eroding my capacity for concentration and luring me away from the rich, nourishing benefits of deep, sustained engagement in challenging tasks, and so at the same time dulling and stealing away my capacity for renewal and lifelong learning…
To many, social media seemed and may still seem like a great tool. I resisted for many years, perhaps to my detriment. Maybe if I had posted content on fb in the early days I would have built more of a following and so it would be easier to get the deeper work I am keen to share published and out in front of those people for whom the type of inquiry I facilitate is nourishing and interesting.
Maybe I was just slow on the uptake, a resistant Luddite. But maybe I was also ahead of the time. I remember a conversation with a friend who certainly wanted to help me get my work more widely known. She showed me her fb feed, and a little of how it worked. Sure enough, I was able to see a mutual friend’s post. But she already had hundreds of friends, did she see all their posts? How would she know whether she had seen those announcements that were most pertinent to her real interests at a given time?
And I asked: ‘So I can spend the time making a post and there’s no guarantee that even the people who have indicated that they want to follow me will see it on their feed?’
‘Well, yes,’
‘So why would I waste my time doing that? If people want to know what I’m doing, they can look on my website.’
‘Yeah, but people are on fb, looking for things, people will see the posts who might not ever look at the site.’
‘Yeah, ‘might’, and I might spend the time of my life doing a hundred other things than crafting posts that no one else sees…’
My friend didn’t really have an answer, and I held out. Several years later, I was interested in a course that ran through a fb group, creating a fb account was the only way to see the course material…
I found the facebook interface pretty disgusting and after a while shifted my posts to instagram. There at least I could see heartwarming photos from people dear to me and edifying or useful messages from people whose perspectives I found useful. Only that seems to be less and less the case now as the majority of posts I see are adverts. And people tell me that if I want my posts to be seen by people I should really pay for ad space so the algorithm boosts the posts…

Am I using the tool, or am I a tool being manipulated by the tech companies?

I don’t want to be a tool.
For those who may not be so familiar with British English, tool is one way to refer to the male member. Just as the insult ‘dickhead’ suggests a person whose intelligence has been hijacked or has never ascended beyond short-term gratification, lowest common denominator titillation and haplessly blinkered perspectives, so ‘tool’ suggests a person who is easily manipulated, shepherded, coerced, someone who is less than fully human.
Yes, less than fully human,
What happens when we outsource our human intelligence? If we have eyes to see, we cannot deny the evidence that already affronts us in terms of physical intelligence. As a species, we seem alarmingly less fit, healthy and robust than previous generations. We have outsourced food production to corporate behemoths who are destroying the soil and filling the ‘super’market aisles with ‘super’poison and ultra processed toxins masquerading as food. We have outsourced much of our movement and it shows. In many cases we have outsourced ‘health’ to a medical/pharmaceutical industry.
There is nothing theoretical in the reality that the same companies and entities that own the pharmaceutical behemoths also own the ‘food’ corporations, oh, and the media corporations too, who can then happily conspire in spinning narratives that deflect our gaze from the ways we are conspiring in our own disease, that capture our attention in divisive cesspools that squash our capacity for original thought and dilute our will for generative action.
Life can seem ‘easier’ when there is an app for everything… when experts, laughably called ‘gurus’ on the internet, spew their still so green it should have been in the ground for several more cycles ‘knowledge’ in the form of life hacks.
Life hack…
The clue is in the name no?
Why would you want to hack at life?
Hacking things to pieces usually leaves them a right, dysfunctional mess.
When I was a kid, in the school summer term, playing tennis in the school morning break, lunch time break and then again for two hours after school, a ‘hacker’ was a term of derision, for one who played with no flair, no panache, no zest, no beauty, and whose only chance of winning points was to just hack the ball back in the hope of drawing an error from the other player.
A ‘hack’ described a wannabe, a writer who wrote about other people’s writing, but couldn’t quite render forth a book of their own.
No, let’s not hack at life, let’s live it, please.
This is what yoga asks us to do, to work with our human nature and our human intelligences, to practice lifelong learning.
When I met one of my teachers, the late great Lakshmitathacarya, he was 74 years old. And he glowed with lustre. In his retirement, he was tending his heritage breed cows and researching the application of Sanskṛt in AI, and he was still teaching a bit, to those in whom he sensed genuine interest.
He told me one time what the bright lustre of his presence so palpably communicated, ‘that it is not just young children and adolescents who can learn quickly,’ Any of us can keep on learning quickly if we practice learning.
The trouble is we don’t. Learning means struggling, undoing and putting back together.
When we are a baby, we don’t know any other way. The toddler who falls for the 72nd time that day is not beset by such useless thoughts as ‘oh what a terrible toddler am I, falling down again!’ No, the toddler is assimilating the new information about what it means to actually balance and ambulate on two feet. The adolescent may very well be beset with all manner of self-doubt and already have their intelligences suppressed by the sense of having to conform to other people’s standards or norms. And yet, their peers are in that same boat and their body cannot resist the swelling tides of change.
But then what happens? More and more, we may find ourselves afflicted by the sense of ‘should’ and trapped within narrow aisles of what is socially prescribed as ‘cool’ or acceptable.
Lakshmitathacarya told me straight out:
‘You have not had an education. We know about the British education system, because it was imposed here. That is not education. Education does not mean to cram in. It means to draw forth. That is what real education is about. And that is what yoga is about, to draw forth the gifts that already live within.
In the British education system, you do not have any real exams. You know the time, you know the date, you can look at last year’s question paper. That is not an exam, that you can cram for, pass with flying colours and then a year later not have any recollection of what you supposedly ‘knew’ to pass it. No, in our tradition, you never know when the guru will test you. Nor do you know what form the exam will take. You’ll know you know the relevant material when you are able to draw on it and apply it in a real life context.’
And sometimes, this learning may take several seasons. As another of my Indian teachers said:
‘Nothing wrong with stumbling. Stumbling is part of the process. Just work on not stumbling in the same way as the last time.’ The toddler acknowledges and assimilates the stumble, then integrates that knowledge.
The great challenge for the older human, whether we are ten years old or many decades into life, is that we have already started to identify with what we ‘know’, or what we ignorantly think we know.
This means that if we are to integrate the stumble, if we are to actually practice yoga, we have to be ready to ‘undo’ our egoic sense of self, we have to be ready to let disintegrate our sense of identity so we can reform it into a more genuine one.
Another way of describing it is that as we keep practising, it’s like we expand our toolkit. There we were, used to our little toolbox that all our handtools fit into perfectly, into their well worn grooves… and now we have access to this new relatively superpowered tool. There is no groove for it to slot into. This new power tool is bigger than the previous whole kit… what to do? We have to rework our kit, reform our way of being, own and acknowledge that we are not the ideas or sense of identity we might previously have taken such pride or found such comfort in…
Another way of thinking about it is that we have been accustomed to a vision of ourselves, of life, of our sense of identity that is a jigsaw of say 16 pieces. They all fit together comfortably.
But maybe you remember those early learner jigsaws fashioned of wood. The pieces fit together loosely. Yes, at one level of perception they make a nice, cohesive whole. But when we look just a bit closer, or when we step back and that image is held up to the light, we can see that it contains huge cracks, big gaps. It’s not so cohesive after all.
And if we have the courage and the faith to do the work, to actually practice yoga, we will take that jigsaw to pieces and allow it to be exploded in the light of that deeper insight. And now the puzzle has 64 pieces, or maybe 1600, or maybe 64000. It’s much more nuanced. The fitting together is subtler, but it reveals a much vaster picture. As we keep expanding it doesn’t allow us to cling to such a fixed egoic structure. The sense of self is renewed. Eventually it may reach a stage where it is not so dependent on external conformity or validation. That is the freedom that yoga promises.
This requires searching, honest practice. Seeing where we have been blind is a jarring affront to the ego that thought it was right, to the sense of self that had identified with being, for example, on the right side of history, to the ego structure that is the product of compounding interest on investing in an identity of being part of the in-crowd, one of the good guys, right on, on trend, or whatever other delusion we have allowed our true self to kowtow to and be smothered by.
When we see where we have been blind this can be a lot to swallow. All the more so in a society that doesn’t train us in the joys of recognising we have been mistaken, but where we are all too familiar with the scathing ostracisation of the mob that cancels one who dares contravene its norms, standards or slogans.
There is a problem with jumping on bandwagons – well really there are many, but to start with: jumping off is risky, it’s hard to do so without getting scathed. That wagon is hurtling along with so much collective inertia, and blinkeredness is almost inevitable. But jumping off will likely be worth it, because it’s highly unlikely that collective blinkeredness is heading in the direction your soul wants to go.
Still, when we see this, it can be a lot to swallow.
Yet this is the basic yoga practice.
It is not about stretching or making fancy shapes in space.
Can I inhabit this space, where the identifactions I used to be so dearly attached to are now exploded, with grace, ease and robust steadiness?
It’s not about getting better at executing techniques. The techniques are designed to help apprentice us in this art of letting go and opening up to perspectives much vaster than the ones we have previously clung to.
It’s not about conforming to some externally referenced norm or ideal.
Yoga is sometimes described as a cow with a tiger’s face. At first it seems forbidding, terrifying even, but once we sincerely go into it, we experience how generous it really is.
Owning the uncomfortable truth that we have identified with something that is false, that is overly simplified, that we have cheered for something that actually might go against our deepest values… this can be so hard to swallow that we may prefer to perform quite ridiculous feats of mental gymnastics to avoid facing the truth that we were wrong.
Or, we can own the reality that it’s part and parcel of being human to be wrong, to be ignorant, to not be able to see the full picture.
Yet it’s also part of being fully human to own this recognition and so allow ourselves to keep learning, to keep inviting a slightly vaster perspective and to keep inviting a slightly fuller expression of our human being.