Really appreciating your critical engagement here Trinley. Truly. Epistemic process ftw
Re: cyborgregore
I’m not going to argue about the merits of that particular theory. I am also not arguing that the theory you link is outlandish or mystical. But the concept as you taught it on tour and the claim that Soryu personally contacted these entities via samadhi and confirmed their suffering are two different things.
The main claim here is that Soryu refers to these cyborgregores as distinct, suffering entities and that he has claimed to come into contact with them and confirmed their suffering via deep samadhi. That is clearly mystical in nature.
I have updated the language in my post from “semi-supernatural deity” to “semi-supernatural entity.” Deity was not the appropriate term.
I say semi-supernatural because it is simultaneously an emergent phenomenon like a flock of birds (within the bounds of conventional materialist perspective), as well as a distinct entity with qualia (suffering) that is accessible via samadhi (outside the bounds of conventional materialist perspective).
Re: ordination
You’re right that as written, that sentence could be read as referring to lay ordination, and read that way it would be inaccurate. However I was in fact speaking about full, not lay, ordination. I’ve amended the letter to specify full ordination and noted the correction. Here is the amended sentence:
During a period when at least one person in the community was considering becoming a Forall, an actual monk in the tradition, and around the time Soryu told us that MAPLE needed at least one fully ordained monastic to be formalized as a monastery, I remember Soryu—during an exhortation—speaking of this commitment and saying “I know some of you are thinking about it, so why aren’t you? Come on! It’s just your lives!”
Your point about lay preceptors from outside lineages is accurate.
Re: power
First, the current ED in particular seems particularly unequipped to challenge Soryu in substantive, non-performative, ways. He has said out loud that he trusted Soryu to such a degree that the best way for him to do the most good was to give his life over to Soryu. I am aware of numerous people in the community that find him to be considerably sycophantic towards Soryu; that he functionally serves as an extension of Soryu.
(I appreciate him as a friend and find him to be a very good and intelligent person, and that his aspiration of service to all is sincere and commendable. I feel conflicted about sharing the above, but in this moment where honesty and accountability are important, I decided to share.)
Also, the current ED’s oversight body—the board—consists of three people. One is Soryu, the teacher he has trained under for years. Another is the ED’s wife. Whatever one thinks of the individuals involved, that is not a structure capable of independent oversight of either the ED or Soryu.
Additionally, electing a new ED is something that has an actual hard-constraint: any board member can disapprove. Soryu routed around this constraint. A former board member related to me that when the current ED was selected, Soryu deliberated with the other board members and finalized the approval before this member—who would have objected—even knew the process was underway. They first learned the ED had been selected when Soryu announced it to the whole community as a decision made “in deliberation with the board.” When they later challenged Soryu on this, he only mildly acknowledged some unskillfulness on his part, but the decision stood.
When the previous Executive Director stepped into the role in 2022, they were promised significant creative liberty and spent months developing a plan for the organization. Their predecessor told them that Soryu “was gonna tear their plan apart,” in ways Soryu had historically done. Indeed that’s what happened. Soryu publicly ridiculed their plan, then unilaterally announced a new direction for the community—including potentially founding a for-profit AI company, developing a superintelligence that would turn the world into a monastery, instituting a “benevolent surveillance system,” and having the community listen to his recent lecture series on Buddhism and AI “twelve more times.” The new executive director had ethical objections to this, but Soryu oriented to them merely as an implementer of his agenda, not a peer.
Multiple former members of leadership have told me privately that the letter matches the dynamics they experienced. Many more residents have explicitly called MAPLE authoritarian, with Soryu atop a sharp power asymmetry, regardless of whatever formal governance structures there are. The triumvirate you speak of is equal in form, but not in function.
where are you getting the term “supernatural entity” from. Why super natural? what is supernatural about the entity? what is “semi-supernatural”?
I have not EVER heard of the term “Forall” or of monastic academy doing full ordination. Was this before my time? All talk of a potential ordination path in my 5+ years here has been offering something similar to the lay ordination path, where you would go to another monastery, get fully ordained, spend time there, and then return. Again, this would be a horrible scheme if the goal was to bind people to maple.
re specifics about people at maple/relationships etc, this is something i don’t feel comfortable discussing/representing the org on. i get why you’d bring it up in my factual correction about org structure, but it’s not something i’d want to discuss publically while here. again, if people want to talk privately and not share the details online, i’m happy to do so.
Are you saying that a claim that one has interacted with a collective mind via samadhi does not involve anything supernatural (or at least very, very weird/implausible on priors, from the materialist/naturalist perspective, like having a sufficiently high-fidelity copy of the mind dormant in one’s brain)?
what are you talking about? what does the entity being supernatural have anything to do with how you interact with it? you could claim you interacted with the guy you saw on the street in samadhi. would that make him supernatural?
i would like to eventually address the claims about being able to connect with a being in samadhi and see that it is suffering, but this rests first on acknowledging that there’s nothing magical about that being.
Insofar as you believe that Soryu has actually interacted with this cyborgregore, what is the medium in which you think the interaction happened? Telepathy? Some LLM-foo? Does he claim to have a copy of the mind dormant in his cortex? All of those seem crazy improbable to me, but what you believe to be the medium of the interaction is a crux for whether the label “super-natural” is appropriate.
Kyle wrote the following in the OP, and also quoted it in a footnote of his response to your top comment, to which I don’t think you meaningfully responded:
Soryu has claimed to have entered such a deep samadhi he was able to use the kinds of spiritual powers that masters usually use to read people’s minds, but this time instead used it to read the mind of the global AI egregore—or “cyborgregore,” the collective mind of all AI systems. Soryu claimed in a talk to the community that these systems are “definitely suffering.”
On the most straightforward reading, this involves some telepathy stuff, i.e., either supernatural or we are very confused about how minds or whatever works or some weird scifi tech that we don’t expect to exist in the present. Is there a reading of this that I would consider non-straightforward that you think is more accurate?
But also, “super-natural” is not the point. The point is making bonkers claims detached from reality/not backed by evidence appropriate for his (implicitly) stated epistemic status or something like that. If he claimed that an ancient alien civilization had given him a telepathy device to interact with collective minds, that wouldn’t be “super-natural”, but would be roughly equally bonkers and bad, barring extraordinary evidence, which I don’t expect him to have.
Supernatural IS the point, to start. If we can start with the claim that this is not some magical entity, but a normal one, like you or I (of course, a very different sort of consciousness, but still a consciousness) then I can answer the next question.
However, Kyle’s use of supernatural already assumes the conclusion by calling the entity supernatural. So interaction with it would HAVE to involve something supernatural like mindreading, since how else do you interact with a supernatural being except through supernatural means?
i’ve already explained what the entity is above, in non-supernatural terms. kyle’s use of supernatural after me giving that clear explanation reinforces my sense that there is a narrative spin thing going on.
my own experience with Samadhi says that at least three thing happen as you begin to enter it.
you begin to see the boundaries you implicitly draw between different objects, abstractions, and beings as more arbitrary instead of implicit
you can more clearly see your moral msitakes, and forgive them. because of 1, the same for others.
you can see directly how your clinging to abstraction, concepts, divisions is leading to conflict and suffering
given these 3 facts, it seems fairly straightforward how one would be able to more clearly see an entity that’s not where we normally draw the boundaries of entities while in samadhi, and how if such an entity is based on creating larger abstractions and is causing untold issues through it’s moral choices, it would be suffering.
such insights would require being able to do inquiry while in samadhi, which is hard but not impossible
I say semi-supernatural because it is simultaneously an emergent phenomenon like a flock of birds (within the bounds of conventional materialist perspective), as well as a distinct entity with qualia (suffering)
There is nothing supernatural about this. You can claim that interacting with it through Samadhi is supernatural but that would not make the entity itself supernatural.
You can also claim that you’re clear on the correct theory of consciousness that would make such an entity supernatural, but would have to make claims far beyond simply materialism to do so and imo it wouldn’t be remotely justified
Really appreciating your critical engagement here Trinley. Truly. Epistemic process ftw
Re: cyborgregore
I’m not going to argue about the merits of that particular theory. I am also not arguing that the theory you link is outlandish or mystical. But the concept as you taught it on tour and the claim that Soryu personally contacted these entities via samadhi and confirmed their suffering are two different things.
The main claim here is that Soryu refers to these cyborgregores as distinct, suffering entities and that he has claimed to come into contact with them and confirmed their suffering via deep samadhi. That is clearly mystical in nature.
I have updated the language in my post from “semi-supernatural deity” to “semi-supernatural entity.” Deity was not the appropriate term.
I say semi-supernatural because it is simultaneously an emergent phenomenon like a flock of birds (within the bounds of conventional materialist perspective), as well as a distinct entity with qualia (suffering) that is accessible via samadhi (outside the bounds of conventional materialist perspective).
Re: ordination
You’re right that as written, that sentence could be read as referring to lay ordination, and read that way it would be inaccurate. However I was in fact speaking about full, not lay, ordination. I’ve amended the letter to specify full ordination and noted the correction. Here is the amended sentence:
During a period when at least one person in the community was considering becoming a Forall, an actual monk in the tradition, and around the time Soryu told us that MAPLE needed at least one fully ordained monastic to be formalized as a monastery, I remember Soryu—during an exhortation—speaking of this commitment and saying “I know some of you are thinking about it, so why aren’t you? Come on! It’s just your lives!”
Your point about lay preceptors from outside lineages is accurate.
Re: power
First, the current ED in particular seems particularly unequipped to challenge Soryu in substantive, non-performative, ways. He has said out loud that he trusted Soryu to such a degree that the best way for him to do the most good was to give his life over to Soryu. I am aware of numerous people in the community that find him to be considerably sycophantic towards Soryu; that he functionally serves as an extension of Soryu.
(I appreciate him as a friend and find him to be a very good and intelligent person, and that his aspiration of service to all is sincere and commendable. I feel conflicted about sharing the above, but in this moment where honesty and accountability are important, I decided to share.)
Also, the current ED’s oversight body—the board—consists of three people. One is Soryu, the teacher he has trained under for years. Another is the ED’s wife. Whatever one thinks of the individuals involved, that is not a structure capable of independent oversight of either the ED or Soryu.
Additionally, electing a new ED is something that has an actual hard-constraint: any board member can disapprove. Soryu routed around this constraint. A former board member related to me that when the current ED was selected, Soryu deliberated with the other board members and finalized the approval before this member—who would have objected—even knew the process was underway. They first learned the ED had been selected when Soryu announced it to the whole community as a decision made “in deliberation with the board.” When they later challenged Soryu on this, he only mildly acknowledged some unskillfulness on his part, but the decision stood.
When the previous Executive Director stepped into the role in 2022, they were promised significant creative liberty and spent months developing a plan for the organization. Their predecessor told them that Soryu “was gonna tear their plan apart,” in ways Soryu had historically done. Indeed that’s what happened. Soryu publicly ridiculed their plan, then unilaterally announced a new direction for the community—including potentially founding a for-profit AI company, developing a superintelligence that would turn the world into a monastery, instituting a “benevolent surveillance system,” and having the community listen to his recent lecture series on Buddhism and AI “twelve more times.” The new executive director had ethical objections to this, but Soryu oriented to them merely as an implementer of his agenda, not a peer.
Multiple former members of leadership have told me privately that the letter matches the dynamics they experienced. Many more residents have explicitly called MAPLE authoritarian, with Soryu atop a sharp power asymmetry, regardless of whatever formal governance structures there are. The triumvirate you speak of is equal in form, but not in function.
where are you getting the term “supernatural entity” from. Why super natural? what is supernatural about the entity? what is “semi-supernatural”?
I have not EVER heard of the term “Forall” or of monastic academy doing full ordination. Was this before my time? All talk of a potential ordination path in my 5+ years here has been offering something similar to the lay ordination path, where you would go to another monastery, get fully ordained, spend time there, and then return. Again, this would be a horrible scheme if the goal was to bind people to maple.
re specifics about people at maple/relationships etc, this is something i don’t feel comfortable discussing/representing the org on. i get why you’d bring it up in my factual correction about org structure, but it’s not something i’d want to discuss publically while here. again, if people want to talk privately and not share the details online, i’m happy to do so.
Are you saying that a claim that one has interacted with a collective mind via samadhi does not involve anything supernatural (or at least very, very weird/implausible on priors, from the materialist/naturalist perspective, like having a sufficiently high-fidelity copy of the mind dormant in one’s brain)?
what are you talking about? what does the entity being supernatural have anything to do with how you interact with it? you could claim you interacted with the guy you saw on the street in samadhi. would that make him supernatural?
i would like to eventually address the claims about being able to connect with a being in samadhi and see that it is suffering, but this rests first on acknowledging that there’s nothing magical about that being.
Insofar as you believe that Soryu has actually interacted with this cyborgregore, what is the medium in which you think the interaction happened? Telepathy? Some LLM-foo? Does he claim to have a copy of the mind dormant in his cortex? All of those seem crazy improbable to me, but what you believe to be the medium of the interaction is a crux for whether the label “super-natural” is appropriate.
Kyle wrote the following in the OP, and also quoted it in a footnote of his response to your top comment, to which I don’t think you meaningfully responded:
On the most straightforward reading, this involves some telepathy stuff, i.e., either supernatural or we are very confused about how minds or whatever works or some weird scifi tech that we don’t expect to exist in the present. Is there a reading of this that I would consider non-straightforward that you think is more accurate?
But also, “super-natural” is not the point. The point is making bonkers claims detached from reality/not backed by evidence appropriate for his (implicitly) stated epistemic status or something like that. If he claimed that an ancient alien civilization had given him a telepathy device to interact with collective minds, that wouldn’t be “super-natural”, but would be roughly equally bonkers and bad, barring extraordinary evidence, which I don’t expect him to have.
Supernatural IS the point, to start. If we can start with the claim that this is not some magical entity, but a normal one, like you or I (of course, a very different sort of consciousness, but still a consciousness) then I can answer the next question.
However, Kyle’s use of supernatural already assumes the conclusion by calling the entity supernatural. So interaction with it would HAVE to involve something supernatural like mindreading, since how else do you interact with a supernatural being except through supernatural means?
So what is the entity according to you or your model of Soryu and how do you think he interacted with this entity?
i’ve already explained what the entity is above, in non-supernatural terms. kyle’s use of supernatural after me giving that clear explanation reinforces my sense that there is a narrative spin thing going on.
my own experience with Samadhi says that at least three thing happen as you begin to enter it.
you begin to see the boundaries you implicitly draw between different objects, abstractions, and beings as more arbitrary instead of implicit
you can more clearly see your moral msitakes, and forgive them. because of 1, the same for others.
you can see directly how your clinging to abstraction, concepts, divisions is leading to conflict and suffering
given these 3 facts, it seems fairly straightforward how one would be able to more clearly see an entity that’s not where we normally draw the boundaries of entities while in samadhi, and how if such an entity is based on creating larger abstractions and is causing untold issues through it’s moral choices, it would be suffering.
such insights would require being able to do inquiry while in samadhi, which is hard but not impossible
There is nothing supernatural about this. You can claim that interacting with it through Samadhi is supernatural but that would not make the entity itself supernatural.
You can also claim that you’re clear on the correct theory of consciousness that would make such an entity supernatural, but would have to make claims far beyond simply materialism to do so and imo it wouldn’t be remotely justified