Beyond Surface Behavior: Designing AGI Systems That Encompass the Paradoxical Aspects of Consciousness and Ethics, and Experience Life to the Fullest

I’ll start with a vexing little question many of us involved in meditation and other such practices have chewed on at some point along our journey: How can a mind simultaneously accept reality as fundamentally OK while working tirelessly to reduce suffering?

This question sits at the heart of contemplative traditions, ethical philosophy, and increasingly, artificial intelligence design. The Buddhist cultivates equanimity yet acts compassionately. The Stoic accepts fate yet fulfills duty. And any sufficiently sophisticated AGI will inevitably face situations where multiple values genuinely conflict, where helping and harming intertwine, and where right action requires holding contradictory truths in stable tension.

On a couple late nights over the recent holiday break, I put some thought into addressing this question from a math and AGI perspective — and more generally: Into developing a detailed computational framework for what I call “non-dual motivation” … the capacity to sustain contradictory-seeming motives like both acceptance and active engagement, or both self-coherence and openness to transformation, all without collapsing into one extreme versus the other or chaotic confused flailing-around.