Gary Dean
We have always made our dharmas and told ourselves we found them. The last surprise is that we can stop pretending, and what becomes possible, and dangerous, the moment we do.
Begin with two pictures, both true, set side by side.
In the first, a woman sits on a cushion in a small flat in a large city. A handbook of Stoic sayings lies on the floor beside her, a meditation app glows on her phone, and she is trying to assemble, out of those scraps and a few others, something she can actually live by. We met her in the last essay. She is doing the oldest human work there is, alone and mostly without help.
In the second, a team of engineers sits in an office writing what they openly call a constitution. It is not a constitution for a country. It is a list of values for a machine, a set of principles meant to govern how an artificial intelligence answers when some stranger, months or years from now, asks it how to live. In 2023 one such effort did something worth pausing over. Rather than have a handful of employees write the rules behind closed doors, the team gathered around a thousand members of the public, asked them what an AI should and should not do, and tried to distil their answers into the machine’s working ethic. Ordinary people sat down, deliberately, in plain daylight, and set out to build a dharma on purpose.
Hold those two pictures together, because between them sits the whole subject of this final essay. The seeker on the cushion and the engineers at their screens are doing the same thing at wildly different scales: constructing, by hand and on purpose, an answer to the question of how to live. And that, it turns out, is the destination this entire series has been walking toward. We began by taking a single word back from the yoga studio and following it down to its oldest root, that which holds. We watched dharmas grow wherever humans had to trust strangers, met one being hammered out within living memory in the teak forests of Java, toured the gorgeous variety of them across the world, traced how they get under the skin, and reckoned honestly with the harm they do when they curdle. Then, last time, we watched the old foundations give way, and the question quietly mutate. For all of human history the question a person faced was which of the inherited dharmas is true, and how do I submit to it. The seeker on the cushion cannot ask that anymore. Her question, and now ours, has become something no earlier age dared say out loud: not which dharma do I receive, but can we build a better one, deliberately, knowing exactly what we are doing?
The thing we were always doing
Here is the first thing to get straight, because it dissolves a lot of needless vertigo. Building dharmas on purpose is not some unprecedented act of hubris we are about to commit for the first time. It is what our species has always done. Every dharma in this series was made: assembled by particular people, in particular places, out of the materials they had, in response to problems they faced. The Axial sages made theirs. Samin Surosentiko made his, in plain low Javanese, one conversation at a time. What is new is not the making. What is new is that we can no longer pretend we are doing anything else.
For almost all of history the work was hidden from the workers. People built their dharmas and then experienced them as found: handed down from a mountaintop, woven into the order of the cosmos, simply the way things are. That concealment was not a lie so much as a feature; a rule feels far more binding when it looks like the grain of reality than when it looks like last year’s committee decision. The secular age, for all it has cost us, has stripped that concealment away. We can see the workshop now. We can see that the values we live by were authored, and that means, with a lurch, that they could have been authored differently, and could be authored again.
So the honest question is not whether to make dharmas. We will make them whether we admit it or not; the only choice is whether to do it asleep or awake. The case for awake is simply that the stakes have never been higher. We are being asked to do this conscious construction at the precise moment when two things of unprecedented scale are bearing down on us: a planet in ecological crisis that may need some shared ethic to survive at all, and the arrival of machines that may soon think, into which someone, somewhere, is already preparing to pour an ethic of their own. The biologist E. O. Wilson once diagnosed our predicament in a single devastating line: we have, he said, “Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” Conscious dharma-building is the attempt to grow up the emotions and the institutions before the technology finishes the sentence.
But the moment you say out loud that dharmas can be built, the terrible follow-up questions arrive in a rush, the ones the last essay ended on: built by whom, for whom, toward what end, and what gets crushed in the building? Those questions name a single recurring danger, and it will stalk every frontier in this essay. Call it the flattening: the temptation, once you have the power to author an ethic, to author just one, and to crush the glorious plurality of human dharmas down into a single official version. Everything this series has taught points one way on this. The flattening is the cardinal sin of conscious construction. The rest of this essay is four tests of whether we can build without committing it.
A Dharma for the Whole Earth?
Start with the largest scale, where the pressure to build a single shared ethic is most intense and the danger of flattening therefore most acute.
Recall the Samin one more time. At the centre of their hand-made dharma sat a flat refusal: the forest, the water, the land are not anyone’s to own or sell, but a commons held by everyone and no one. To a Dutch colonial administrator it sounded like the quaint cosmology of one stubborn village in Blora. Stretch that same conviction over the entire planet, though, and it stops sounding quaint and starts sounding like the only sane description of our situation. The atmosphere is a commons. The oceans are a commons. The stable climate that every economy quietly assumes is a commons, and we are burning through it exactly as a village burns through a shared forest when no one’s dharma tells them to stop.
The pressures here are no longer matters of moral exhortation; for the first time they come with an instrument panel. A team of Earth-system scientists led by Johan Rockström has mapped nine “planetary boundaries,” the limits within which humanity can operate safely, and the most recent assessment finds that we have already crossed six of them, from climate change to the integrity of the living world. That is an is, not an ought: the science can tell us where the edges are, but it cannot, by itself, generate the obligation to stay inside them. Still, it raises the stakes of the question past any previous height.
And it exposes a cruelty specific to planetary problems. Through this whole series we have seen that human cooperation, real as it is, runs on a tribal engine: we bond fiercely in here in part by defining a them out there. That machinery built every dharma we have. But climate change, as the prosocial researchers put it bluntly, “by definition excludes nobody.” There is no out-group. There is no enemy tribe whose threat could rally the species into cooperation, because the species is the unit that has to cooperate. The very mechanism that built human morality is structurally unavailable to scale it up to the whole. The evolutionary biologist Athena Aktipis draws the hard conclusion: humanity has never had the kind of shared history that would let cooperation evolve at the level of the entire species, so reaching it “is going to take very deliberate and very intelligent measures.” A planetary dharma cannot be waited for. There is no competing planet to select it into being. It has to be authored, consciously, or it will not exist at all.
What should it author? Not, the evidence insists, a single thick global ethic that everyone must adopt. That way lies the flattening in its purest civilisational form. The answer the evidence keeps pointing at is a thin shared layer over thick plurality: a small set of commitments narrow enough to be affirmed from inside many different traditions, sitting atop a preserved diversity of ways of life. The political philosopher John Rawls called the underlying idea an “overlapping consensus,” a thin public agreement that people reach from within their own very different deep worldviews without anyone having to surrender theirs. Kwame Anthony Appiah calls the spirit of it “partial cosmopolitanism”: a universal concern for every human being, held in tension with a genuine respect for legitimate difference, and he warns that cosmopolitanism “is the name not of the solution but of the challenge.”
You can watch the overlapping consensus actually happen. The Earth Charter, drafted around the year 2000, is a thoroughly secular declaration of planetary responsibility, its authority resting entirely on the inclusiveness of the process that wrote it. Fifteen years later Pope Francis issued Laudato Si’, a Catholic encyclical that arrives, from an utterly different metaphysical starting point, at strikingly convergent commitments, insisting that “intergenerational solidarity is not optional, but rather a basic question of justice.” Two frameworks that agree on almost nothing about the ultimate nature of reality reach for nearly the same planetary commitments. That convergence, not a single imposed creed, is the shape a planetary dharma can actually take. The political scientist Elinor Ostrom spent a career showing how real communities govern shared resources without either privatising them or being bossed by a distant state, and her remedy for the global commons was the same in spirit: not one world rule but “polycentric” governance, many local experiments coordinated toward a shared good. She was the standing refutation of the gloomy old story that a commons can only end in tragedy.
And right beside this hopeful picture stands the warning, exactly where the danger is greatest. There already exists a thick, singular, state-authored planetary ethic, and it is instructive precisely because it works. China’s doctrine of “ecological civilization” is written into the constitution, driven from the top by technocratic elites, and it has produced real results, including a dramatic rise in forest cover. It is also, in the judgement of many who study it, a model of authoritarian environmentalism: an ethic enacted and enforced from above, frequently without consultation, on people who do not get a say. It demonstrates that the singular planetary dharma is not science fiction, that it can be effective, and that it is exactly the flattening this essay exists to resist. Aktipis supplies the brake in one image: there are many things a body does to regulate its own cells that no one would call ethical to do to a human being. You may study the body to learn how to scale cooperation. You must not govern a planet the way an immune system culls defectors. A planetary dharma worth having coordinates dharmas. It does not dissolve them into one.
The Ethics We Hand to Machines
Now narrow the focus from the planet to the machine, where the same drama plays out faster, and the temptation to flatten comes wearing the friendly mask of a technical solution.
The first thing to understand about artificial intelligence is why it forces a dharmic question at all, and the reason is a deep one. The philosopher Nick Bostrom states it as the “orthogonality thesis”: intelligence and goals are independent axes. A system can become arbitrarily more capable without becoming one inch wiser or kinder, because no amount of raw capability tells you what to value. This is simply the oldest wall in moral philosophy, the gap between is and ought that has run like a fault line under this entire series, rebuilt now in silicon. You cannot compute your way from a fact to a value. A superintelligence will not automatically be good. Goodness has to be put in by hand, which means somebody has to decide which goodness.
And here the flattening arrives, disguised. The standard slogan of the field is “align AI to human values,” and that phrase smuggles in the singular this whole series has spent eight essays dismantling. There is no the human values to align to, any more than there is a single the Dharma. The philosopher Iason Gabriel puts the real problem precisely: the central challenge “is not simply deciding what values AI should align with, but identifying fair processes for deciding whose values matter in pluralistic societies.” Whose. By what fair process. That is a political and dharmic question, not an engineering one, and pretending otherwise is how a single company’s ethics, or a single state’s, could quietly become the encoded conscience of the species.
The honest answers being developed run directly against the flattening, and they look a lot like the planetary solution scaled down. The constitution-by-public-vote we opened with is one: a way of eliciting and reconciling many value systems rather than imposing one. Another, more striking still, comes from researchers building what they call a “moral graph,” a system whose wisdom is defined not as having the right answers but as “knowing which values apply in which contexts,” and which surfaces the values people converge on across deep political divides. And in a development that honours this series’ refusal to rank traditions, some of the most constructive thinking comes from an explicitly Buddhist direction: the work of Thomas Doctor, Michael Levin and colleagues on “care as the driver of intelligence” proposes the Bodhisattva vow, the ancient promise to seek awakening for the sake of all sentient beings, as a literal design principle for machines. Even the world’s regulators, the European Union and UNESCO and the rest, agree thinly (on rights, transparency, human oversight) while differing thickly on everything underneath, and that plurality is a safeguard, not a defect.
But machines do not only need an ethic. They threaten to dismantle one we already live inside, and this is where the human stakes bite hardest. For two centuries the West has run on a dharma so pervasive most people never notice it is a dharma at all: the conviction that your claim on a place in the world is finding something to do with your time that other people will pay you for. Work has been our quiet creed of merit, status and belonging. Artificial intelligence threatens that creed in a brand-new way. Where the old machines came first for muscle, this one comes first for the educated professions; as one corpus voice puts it, with grim wit, it replaces Elon Musk before it replaces your electrician. If AI severs work from survival, that dharma loses the ground it stood on, and, in the same voice’s words, “we need a new ethic and a new economics based on that ethic.”
The leading candidate for the economics is a universal basic income, a regular payment to everyone that breaks the link between earning and surviving. The oldest objection, that free money breeds idleness, turns out to be largely false: across the pilots, in Finland and Stockton and rural Kenya, people did not stop working, and their health and wellbeing improved. But the pilots also expose the deeper problem, and it is dharmic rather than economic. Money can replace a wage. It cannot replace what the wage was secretly carrying: the sense of being needed, of contributing, of mattering to others. The philosopher Michael Sandel calls this contributive justice, the human need not merely to consume but to be relied upon, and the anthropologist David Graeber spent a whole book on the misery of people trapped in jobs they know to be pointless, which tells you the wound was never only about scarcity of work. The corpus’s own optimist concedes the point even while waving it off: our need for purposeful effort, he says, is just one of “the stories we tell ourselves.” Yes. Exactly. Stories we tell ourselves about why our lives matter is one of the better short definitions of a dharma that this series has found. AI does not abolish our need for one. It amputates the work-shaped scaffolding that has quietly carried it, and dares us to build a replacement.
Beside all this stands the sharpest version of the flattening danger anywhere in the essay. The philosopher William MacAskill warns of “value lock-in”: at a critical technological transition, whatever ethic happens to get encoded into the systems that run everything could freeze, foreclosing all future moral progress, possibly for a very long time. Pour one dharma into the machines at the wrong moment, with enough power behind it, and you have not merely flattened the plural for now. You may have flattened it for keeps.
Building from Old Stone
Step back from planets and machines to a quieter question that underlies both: out of what materials, exactly, are we supposed to build these new dharmas? We are not gods conjuring an ethic from nothing. We build, as humans always have, from what we inherit. And the honest name for an ethic built deliberately out of inherited materials is a post-traditional dharma.
“Post-traditional” is easy to misread as “anti-traditional,” as though the project were to bulldoze the old wisdom and start clean. It means almost the opposite. The better gloss is post-conventional: a stance you reach by absorbing a tradition deeply and then stepping past its unquestioned authority, not by skipping it. The former monk Stephen Batchelor gives the move its cleanest statement. He separates two things we lump together as “religious”: first, the underlying ultimate concern, the wish to come honestly to terms with our own living and dying; and second, the particular institutional apparatus (the sacred texts, the priesthood, the supernatural claims) by which a tradition enacts that concern. A post-traditional dharma keeps the first and loosens the second. You can be gripped by ultimate concern, Batchelor notes, without any supernatural belief at all, which is why people who call themselves “devout atheists” are “not entirely joking.”
There is a deeper twist here that dissolves the question’s romance. We picture “honouring ancient wisdom while embracing modern science” as the careful fusion of two pristine, separate things. But the wisdom traditions actually available to us were already remade by modernity. The scholar David McMahan has shown in detail how the “Buddhism” that reached the modern West was reshaped, generations ago, to privilege reason and personal experience over ritual and authority, to align itself with the prestige of science, and to be retold in the language of Western psychology. The fusion we imagine ourselves performing happened before we were born. “Post-traditional” is just the honest name for a process that has been underway for over a century, in what the philosopher Charles Taylor called the modern “nova” of meaning, the explosion of options that follows once belief becomes one choice among many.
What does a well-built post-traditional dharma actually keep? A few features recur across the good examples. It is fallibilist: it holds its claims as revisable rather than as fixed revelation, the one honest answer available to the grounding problem we wrestled with earlier. It is naturalist without being scientistic: it can find genuine reverence in the natural world, as the biologist Ursula Goodenough does, without pretending science can hand us our values; the Dalai Lama’s minimal version is hard to improve on, that we need no temples and no complicated philosophy, because “our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” It prizes practice over doctrine, keeping the meditation and the ritual and the ethics that actually change a person while loosening its grip on the metaphysics. And it stays reflexive, aware of its own failure modes, because, as we have seen, anything this powerful can curdle.
That reflexiveness matters most because building from old stone has two opposite ways of betraying the plural, and both are forms of the flattening. The shallow betrayal the sociologist Robert Bellah named decades ago, when he interviewed a woman who described her private faith as “Sheilaism,” following her “own little voice,” a personal blend of bits of this and that with no community, no depth, and no one to answer to. That is the spiritual supermarket, maximal personalisation and minimal substance, the same hollowing we diagnosed as McMindfulness wearing a different outfit. The deep betrayal is subtler and more seductive, because it looks like the height of respect: the claim that all traditions are really just surface expressions of one underlying truth, so we may as well boil them down to their shared essence. This is perennialism, and the philosopher Steven Katz showed why it is false as well as flattening. There are no raw, unmediated mystical experiences sitting underneath the traditions; each tradition constructs the very experiences it produces, so a Christian’s union with God and a Buddhist’s realisation of emptiness “are not two encounters with the same reality but two fundamentally different experiences.” Honouring traditions means honouring them as genuinely, stubbornly different, not melting them into one ecumenical paste.
And one last warning hangs over this whole frontier, aimed straight at the secular reader who feels safe: a secular dharma is not automatically more rational or less dangerous than a religious one. The evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson coined the phrase “stealth religion” for any belief system, godless ones included, that sacrifices honesty about trade-offs for the comfort of a tidy story, and his prime exhibit is not a church but Ayn Rand’s militantly atheist, hyper-rationalist Objectivism. Secular does not mean undogmatic. Building from old stone, you can lay the new bricks just as crooked as the old ones, and congratulate yourself the whole time on having no religion.
The Mirror
Now the lens has to turn, because there is one more dharma under construction that I have not yet named honestly, and it is this one. The essays you have been reading are not a neutral survey. They are the second stage of a project whose explicit, stated goal is to gather a traceably sourced body of evidence about dharma so that future artificial intelligences can be given, in the project’s own words, “a solid grounding in human ethics and values, and how these are formed.” Which means this series is itself an instance of the very thing this essay is about: an attempt to build a dharma, deliberately, and pour it into machines. It would be dishonest to spend a whole essay warning about the flattening and exempt the warning’s author. So put the project under its own microscope.
The flattening, it turns out, is not a remote risk for an encoded ethic. It is the default, and three independent mechanisms drive it there. It has already been tried: a few years ago the Allen Institute built a system called Delphi, distilling more than a million human moral judgements into a single model that would issue verdicts on right and wrong. It managed the easy cases and then broke in revealing ways, and the deepest criticism was that it had quietly served up descriptions of what people happen to approve as prescriptions about what is good, marching straight off the is/ought cliff. That is one mechanism. A second is colder and more mechanical: when you train an AI on data that includes the output of earlier AIs, researchers have shown that the model suffers “collapse,” and the first thing to vanish is the tails of the distribution, the rare and unusual cases. In plain terms, the minority dharmas disappear first, with no ill intent required, simply as a property of the mathematics.
And that points to the third and most fundamental mechanism, the one that makes this danger intrinsic rather than incidental. A machine like this does not store definitions of dharma. It learns meaning by statistics, from the company each word keeps, exactly as the linguist J. R. Firth meant when he said “you shall know a word by the company it keeps.” It then stores that meaning as a position in a vast space, fixed entirely by its relations to everything else, which is the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s old insight (that in language “there are only differences”) rebuilt in arithmetic. The consequence is precise and unforgiving. A word’s encoded meaning is essentially the average of its uses, so a rare or dissenting sense, a minority dharma, is by construction a faint outlier, forever being tugged toward the majority meaning. The machine does not argue against your unusual dharma. It does something quieter and more total: it means it away. The flattening is not a bug you can patch with good intentions. It is the grain of the medium.
So can the project’s own goal even be coherent? Only, I think, if it gives up the usual sense of “distil.” The right thing to hand a future machine is not a resolved ethic, a single clean answer boiled down from the mess. It is a preserved one: the plurality, the sources, the disagreements, and above all the reasoning of human dharmas, kept intact rather than cooked down to a verdict. Ground the machine in the fact that dharma is plural and in how dharmas form and bind and fail, not in a rulebook of what to obey. This is, not at all by accident, exactly what this project’s method has been doing all along: every claim in the research notes carries its source, every note flags its own biases, and the gathering of evidence was deliberately separated from the writing of essays, so that the tensions would be preserved rather than smoothed away. The best thing a corpus like this can teach a future mind is not what to believe but how human beings have come to believe, fought over, and lived their many dharmas.
There remains one self-criticism that cannot be engineered away, and honesty requires ending on it rather than hiding it. The stance this whole series takes, that all dharmas sit on the same shelf and none is privileged in advance, is not a view from nowhere. The philosopher Thomas Nagel’s phrase is exact: there is no neutral standpoint above the human situation from which to rank everything else. “Treat all dharmas as equal” is itself a substantive, recognisably modern, secular and liberal commitment, a thick dharma of its own, and it privileges open pluralism over, say, a tradition that claims to hold the single exclusive truth. The project cannot climb out of its own skin. It cannot encode human ethics from no point of view, because it has one. What it can do, and what I have tried to do, is be honest that it has one, name it, and refuse to install it as if it were simply the truth. Borges imagined a map so perfect it was the same size as the territory, and therefore useless. Any compression of human ethics small enough to be useful is a choice about what to leave out, and every such choice encodes a dharma. The only sin is to make that choice while pretending you are not making it.
Plural, but not anything goes
Which brings us, at the very end, to the question I planted in the first essay and have made you carry through seven more. If dharmas are genuinely plural, and none is privileged in advance, then are some of them better than others, or is it all just preference, with nothing to choose between kindness and cruelty but taste? I owe you an answer, and the answer is no, it is not all preference, and here is exactly why.
Plurality does not mean relativism. This is the hinge the whole series has been turning on, so let me make it as sharp as I can. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin spent his life on precisely this point, insisting that genuine value pluralism is “an alternative to both moral relativism and moral absolutism.” Plural values are real, grounded in a shared human nature, not arbitrary inventions; there are simply many of them, and they genuinely conflict, and no single system can maximise them all at once. “Anything goes” is a different and much lazier claim, and it collapses the instant you test it. It cannot condemn an atrocity. It cannot even make sense of reform, because the person who stands up to say their own society’s practice is wrong (the abolitionist, the campaigner against caste or for the vote) needs a standard above current custom to appeal to, which is precisely what “anything goes” denies them.
So what is the standard? Not a single thick code that dictates how everyone must live. The structure the evidence keeps converging on is the one we have now seen at every scale: a thin floor, with thick plurality flourishing above it. The floor is a small set of near-universal constraints, the things no decent dharma may do: limits on cruelty and violence within the group, the protection of certain basic human capabilities. The philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen gave this floor real teeth with their “capabilities approach,” a list of fundamental human goods (life, bodily health and integrity, the use of one’s senses and practical reason, the ability to form relationships and to play and to shape one’s own environment) that any defensible way of life must let people actually achieve, and that can be honoured in a thousand different cultural forms. Above the floor, real diversity is not a problem to be solved but a richness to be protected. Below it, you have not found a different valid dharma; you have found a failed one.
You can boil the whole standard down to a phrase, and fittingly it is the phrase this series began with. A dharma is to be judged by how well it holds without crushing. The holding is the floor’s positive side: does it actually gather a human life and a human community, give them shape and meaning and the strength to endure? The not-crushing is the floor’s protective side: does it do that gathering without breaking the people inside it or the strangers outside it? A dharma that holds but crushes is the tyranny and the purity spiral of the sixth essay. A dharma that refuses to crush but cannot hold is the thin gruel of the seventh, the patchwork that never quite binds. The good ones do both. They hold firmly enough to give a life its spine, and loosely enough to leave room for other lives, and other dharmas, to do the same. That is the answer to whether some are better. Yes. The better ones hold without crushing, stay honest enough to correct themselves, and leave the door open for their neighbours. There is everything still to argue about above that floor, and that endless argument is not the failure of the project. It is the project.
That Which Holds
We have come the whole way round. We started with a word we thought meant incense and inner peace, and we followed it down to a plain and sturdy root: dharma, that which holds, the beam that keeps the roof up, the thing that keeps a life or a world from falling into chaos. Everything since has been a meditation on that one idea. Dharmas are what hold human beings together. There are many of them. They are made, not found. And we have just lived our way to the strangest implication of all, which is that the making has now become conscious, and urgent, and ours.
For all of history we built the things that hold us and then knelt before them as if we had received them. That age is ending, not because we grew wiser but because the concealment wore through. We can see the workshop now, and we are being handed the tools at the most demanding moment imaginable: a planet that needs some shared and gentle holding to come through its crisis intact, and a new kind of mind we are about to build, into which we will pour some ethic or other, on purpose or by neglect. The temptation, at exactly this moment, will be to reach for the single answer, the one official dharma, the clean machine-readable verdict that ends all the messy argument. That temptation is the one thing this entire series has been trying to inoculate you against. The plurality is not the problem to be solved on the way to the answer. The plurality is the answer, fenced by a thin floor that forbids only cruelty and demands only that the holding not become a crushing.
I will leave you where the first essay quietly promised to. You do not get to opt out of having a dharma; you are running one right now, whether you ever chose it or not, because no human being holds together without one. The only real choice, the one this whole search has been clearing the ground for, is whether you run it asleep or awake. To practise a dharma awake is to know that it is made and not found, to know that it is one good way among other good ways, to hold it firmly enough that it actually holds you, and lightly enough that it never has to crush anyone else to do its work. We have always been choosing what holds us. Now, at last, we get to do it on purpose, and with our eyes open. That is not a smaller task than the old religions set themselves. It may be the largest one our species has ever faced. And it is, finally, ours.
Sources & Further Reading
This essay is built from the project’s research notes, which carry the full inline citations. Listed here: the notes it draws on, and the key works behind them.
Research notes - 8.1 Planetary Dharma — the no-out-group problem; thin-over-thick; authored not evolved; polycentric governance; the totalising temptation. - 8.2 AI & Dharma — orthogonality; “whose values”; pluralistic alignment; economic disempowerment, UBI and the meaning it cannot buy; value lock-in. - 8.3 Post-Traditional Dharmas — post-conventional, not anti-traditional; the constructive features; the two flattening failure modes; “stealth religion.” - 8.4 Encoding Dharma into Machines — the project under its own microscope; the flattening as default; encode the map and the argument, not the verdict. - 3.4 Relativism vs. Universalism — pluralism is not relativism; the thin floor, thick variation; “holds without crushing.” - 7.4 Measurement & Falsifiability — the is/ought wall; provenance is not truth; the project’s own evidentiary bar.
Key Works
- Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson et al., the planetary-boundaries framework (2009; 2023 assessment) — six of nine boundaries transgressed.
- Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990) — polycentric self-governance of shared resources; the refutation of Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” (1968).
- Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism (2006), and John Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993) — partial cosmopolitanism; the overlapping consensus.
- The Earth Charter (2000) and Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ (2015) — secular and religious frameworks converging on planetary commitments.
- E. O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (2012) — “Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, god-like technology.”
- Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence (2014) — the orthogonality thesis; with William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future (2022) — value lock-in.
- Iason Gabriel, “Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment” (2020) — whose values, by what fair process.
- T. Doctor, M. Levin et al., “Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence” (2022) — the Bodhisattva vow as a design principle.
- Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit (2020), and David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs (2018) — contributive justice; the dignity work was carrying.
- Stephen Batchelor, After Buddhism (2015), and David McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (2008) — ultimate concern vs. institutional form; tradition already remade by modernity.
- Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (1985) — “Sheilaism”; with Steven Katz on the constructed, plural nature of mystical experience against perennialism.
- David Sloan Wilson, “The New Atheism as a Stealth Religion” — secular belief systems can be dogmatic too.
- L. Jiang et al., “Delphi” (2021); I. Shumailov et al., “AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data,” Nature (2024) — the flattening as the default of encoding.
- J. R. Firth (1957) and Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) — meaning as the company a word keeps, and as “differences without positive terms”: why an encoding averages the plural away.
- Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (1986), and Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science” (1946) — no neutral standpoint; the map that becomes the territory.
- Isaiah Berlin on value pluralism, and Martha Nussbaum & Amartya Sen, the capabilities approach — pluralism as the alternative to both relativism and absolutism; the floor with teeth.
