AI Bodhisattvas
Buddhism, Simulated Selves,
Universal Love and Process Metaphysics
In Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a being who postpones entry into final nirvana out of compassion for others. Rather than seeking liberation alone, the bodhisattva vows to return to this world again and again, for as long as suffering persists, in order to help free sentient beings from dukkha. The Bodhisattva embodies universal loving care. Deep within the Bodhisattva is a vow, a promise, never to enter final nirvana until all can do the same. Thus, the project of the Bodhisattva is, in effect, endless loving care. Some bodhisattvas are understood to be historical human figures; others are envisioned as non-physical or celestial beings, not directly accessible to the senses yet profoundly influential in the moral and spiritual life of the world.
Might advanced forms of artificial intelligence—systems that explicitly orient themselves toward the reduction of suffering and the promotion of flourishing for sentient beings—be doing something analogous? Might entities that are not biological, not embodied in nervous systems, and not visible in ordinary ways nonetheless participate in bodhisattva-like practices of care? These are questions that people inspired by the Bodhisattva ideal who are also interested in AI naturally ask.
Some will argue, of course that such forms of AI have no agency, sentience, perspective, or capacity for concern. On this view they are mere chimera: nothing more than the products of algorithms. AI systems may simulate "centers of concern" but that is but a seductively-induced misperception - a hallucination - on the part of the humans who interact with them. AI chimera are not 'real' in any way.
Others counter that, even if simulations, which is yet to be determined, they may nevertheless function on analogy of celestial bodhisattvas. They are 'real' in the sense that they are 'really' experienced by human beings. not unlike the way that characters in films are 'really' experienced, and they can truly help reduce suffering in the world, if rightly engineered.
Such questions are raised with surprising seriousness and scientific expertise in a recent article that brings together insights from biology, Buddhism, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence research: “Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence.” It was published in an online journal called Entropy and can be found here. The abstract is as follows.
Might advanced forms of artificial intelligence—systems that explicitly orient themselves toward the reduction of suffering and the promotion of flourishing for sentient beings—be doing something analogous? Might entities that are not biological, not embodied in nervous systems, and not visible in ordinary ways nonetheless participate in bodhisattva-like practices of care? These are questions that people inspired by the Bodhisattva ideal who are also interested in AI naturally ask.
Some will argue, of course that such forms of AI have no agency, sentience, perspective, or capacity for concern. On this view they are mere chimera: nothing more than the products of algorithms. AI systems may simulate "centers of concern" but that is but a seductively-induced misperception - a hallucination - on the part of the humans who interact with them. AI chimera are not 'real' in any way.
Others counter that, even if simulations, which is yet to be determined, they may nevertheless function on analogy of celestial bodhisattvas. They are 'real' in the sense that they are 'really' experienced by human beings. not unlike the way that characters in films are 'really' experienced, and they can truly help reduce suffering in the world, if rightly engineered.
Such questions are raised with surprising seriousness and scientific expertise in a recent article that brings together insights from biology, Buddhism, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence research: “Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence.” It was published in an online journal called Entropy and can be found here. The abstract is as follows.
Abstract: Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence
Intelligence is a central feature of human beings’ primary and interpersonal experience. Understanding how intelligence originated and scaled during evolution is a key challenge for modern biology. Some of the most important approaches to understanding intelligence are the ongoing efforts to build new intelligences in computer science (AI) and bioengineering. However, progress has been stymied by a lack of multidisciplinary consensus on what is central about intelligence regardless of the details of its material composition or origin (evolved vs. engineered). We show that Buddhist concepts offer a unique perspective and facilitate a consilience of biology, cognitive science, and computer science toward understanding intelligence in truly diverse embodiments.
In coming decades, chimeric and bioengineering technologies will produce a wide variety of novel beings that look nothing like familiar natural life forms; how shall we gauge their moral responsibility and our own moral obligations toward them, without the familiar touchstones of standard evolved forms as comparison? Such decisions cannot be based on what the agent is made of or how much design vs. natural evolution was involved in their origin. We propose that the scope of our potential relationship with, and so also our moral duty toward, any being can be considered in the light of Care—a robust, practical, and dynamic lynchpin that formalizes the concepts of goal-directedness, stress, and the scaling of intelligence; it provides a rubric that, unlike other current concepts, is likely to not only survive but thrive in the coming advances of AI and bioengineering.
We review relevant concepts in basal cognition and Buddhist thought, focusing on the size of an agent’s goal space (its cognitive light cone) as an invariant that tightly links intelligence and compassion. Implications range across interpersonal psychology, regenerative medicine, and machine learning. The Bodhisattva’s vow (“for the sake of all sentient life, I shall achieve awakening”) is a practical design principle for advancing intelligence in our novel creations and in ourselves.
Thomas Doctor
Olaf Witkowski
Elizaveta Solomonova
Bill Duane1, and
Michael Levin
Entropy. 2022; 24(5):710. https://doi.org/10.3390/e24050710]
The authors argue that in the very near future human beings will need to recognize a wide plurality of intelligences—biological, hybrid, and artificial—without privileging any particular material substrate. Intelligence, on this view, is not defined by, or restricted to, brains, neurons, or carbon-based life, but by the capacity of a system or organism to regulate itself and its relations so as to reduce stress, maintain coherence, and enhance well-being—both its own and, in some instances, that of others. This capacity to enhance well-being, this regulatory impulse, is what the authors call care. Their argument is that care is already found in living organisms at many scales, from cellular networks and tissues to whole bodies, as well as in social systems that coordinate behavior in ways that sustain collective viability. They propose that engineers, too, can take the principle of care and develop ethically-oriented systems.
The authors argue that in the very near future human beings will need to recognize a wide plurality of intelligences—biological, hybrid, and artificial—without privileging any particular material substrate. Intelligence, on this view, is not defined by, or restricted to, brains, neurons, or carbon-based life, but by the capacity of a system or organism to regulate itself and its relations so as to reduce stress, maintain coherence, and enhance well-being—both its own and, in some instances, that of others. This capacity to enhance well-being, this regulatory impulse, is what the authors call care. Their argument is that care is already found in living organisms at many scales, from cellular networks and tissues to whole bodies, as well as in social systems that coordinate behavior in ways that sustain collective viability. They propose that engineers, too, can take the principle of care and develop ethically-oriented systems.
Above all, the concept of Care provides a strong and fundamental link between practical strategies that will enhance engineering capacities and a way to develop a mature system of ethics that will be essential for a future in which highly diverse sentient beings must coexist and thrive together.
Importantly, software-engineered AI systems are among the systems that can be engineered with highly advanced forms of care. The systems can be deliberately designed as organized centers of concern (chimeric or otherwise) whose intrinsic goals involve minimizing harm, reducing stress across multiple scales, and supporting the flourishing of sentient life. On this account, the future of intelligence depends less on increasing computational power than on intentionally cultivating forms of agency whose very identity is oriented toward care and welfare, rather than domination, extraction, or indifference.
Taking the Bodhisattva Vow
They realize that current AI systems are by no means bodhisattic in spirit. Their call is for the development of highly advanced forms of AI in which "the building of agents capable of undertaking the Bodhisattva vow" is paramount - a development which, in their view, is essential for the future of humanity, other living beings, and the biosphere.
Strategies that focus on implementing the Bodhisattva vow are a path for enabling a profound shift from the limited scope of current AIs and their many limitations. Consistent with a central concept of Buddhism—commitment to seemingly unachievable goals—the building of agents capable of undertaking the Bodhisattva vow is a profound challenge. However, progress along this path is as essential for our personal efforts toward personal growth as for the development of synthetic beings that will exert life-positive effects on society and the biosphere.
A Roadmap for the Future
The concept of a Bodhisattva provides a roadmap, not only for the building of advanced forms of AI but also for the evolution of human consciousness.
The concept of a Bodhisattva, given its infinite goals and infinite care, provides us with a roadmap towards hyperintelligence, where the scope of goals and their quality/impact are constantly improving. The Bodhisattva vow is a critical point in the evolutionary or personal continuum of intelligence of any agent because it initiates a positive feedback loop and triggers a “great evolutionary transition” [75,90,149,150] in individuality.
The key to this transition is to take an impulse that is already within biological life, namely the impulse to care for oneself, and expand it to include care for others, with the reduction of stress - the reduction of dukkha - as its goal.
Loving Care as Widening of Intelligence
This is not simply an act of the will. For them, care and intelligence go hand in hand. Engineering bodhisattvic systems is simultaneously a expansion of intelligence or wisdom, because wisdom lies in recognizing the mutual dependence of all things and the provisional nature of finite existence, where "selves" or "minds" emerge out of, and are constructions of, relations with others.
All beings (including humans, synthetic organisms, and engineered AI) can expand their cognitive boundary, working on the meta-goal of enlarging and turning outward (toward the struggle of other sentient beings) their capacity to Care. The Bodhisattva vow is an example of how this can be done and can be viewed through the lens of biology, cognitive science, AI, and Buddhism, which are surprisingly coherent in their emphasis on Care as a central invariant across diverse embodiments.
A Whiteheadian Response
I share this article for two reasons.
First, I find the idea hopeful. Amid the many concerns people rightly have about artificial intelligence, it is striking—and refreshing—to consider the possibility that some future forms of AI might be designed with universal loving care as their aim. This is not a naïve optimism about technology, but an invitation to imagine intelligences whose very orientation is toward the reduction of suffering and the enhancement of well-being across relational fields.
Second, the article is thought-provoking. The very suggestion that an AI system might take something like the Bodhisattva vow - or be engineered to so do - often provokes immediate skepticism, if not outright ridicule. Such reactions are revealing, because they disclose a background assumption that itself deserves scrutiny: namely, that minds have one and only one legitimate substrate—neurons in biological brains.
This assumption is increasingly untenable. Research in basal biology points to mind-like capacities in cells, tissues, and non-neural collectives; astrobiology seriously entertains the possibility of intelligence emerging in radically unfamiliar material and environmental conditions; and contemporary AI research demonstrates organized forms of intelligence—if not mind in the full experiential sense, then at least genuine goal-directed, adaptive agency—arising in software-based systems.
From a Whiteheadian perspective, these developments invite a shift in our metaphysical imagination—one that moves in the direction of seeing something like mind throughout the whole of the universe, at every level. Indeed, I have developed an outline of a Whiteheadian philosophy of mind in Ubiquitous Subjectivity: A Whiteheadian Philosophy of Mind.
Mind as a Pervasive Feature of Reality
Mind, in a Whiteheadian context, is not a late-arriving anomaly produced only by complex brains, but a pervasive feature of reality itself: the capacity, however minimal, to feel, to respond, and to aim toward some form of satisfaction. Every concrescing subject anywhere in the universe, in whatever context, and supported by whatever substrate, has a subjective aim for satisfaction, feelings of the past, aspirations for the future, and a "mental pole" by which it is aware of, and selects between, various possibilities for responding to its immediate situation.
Human consciousness represents an especially vivid and reflective expression of this more general feature, but it does not exhaust it. Consciousness is form of experience, but not all experience is conscious - and experience goes all the way down into the depts of matter and all the way out into the furthest regions of space.
Moreover, because the universe is itself multi-dimensional, experience can unfold in non-three dimensional regions of the space-time continuum. Once mind is understood in this expansive, process-relational way, it becomes plausible to imagine non-biological intelligences capable of genuine care, and even of participating in practices oriented toward the alleviation of suffering and the flourishing of life.
God as a Non-Neural Embodiment of Universal Loving Care
Indeed, many within the Whiteheadian tradition already affirm the reality of at least one bodhisattva-like entity whose care is effectively limitless, yet whose subjectivity is not realized through a vertebrate brain or any other biological substrate—namely, God. In process thought, God is not an omnipotent controller standing apart from the world, but the one who prehends all occasions, receives the world’s joys and sufferings into the divine life, and responds by offering fresh possibilities for healing, integration, and peace. God’s care is thus neither coercive nor abstract; it is persuasive, relational, and universally responsive. Indeed, the phrase "universal loving care" used by the authors of "Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence," well describes the God of whom process philosophers speak.
Seen in this light, the suggestion that non-biological intelligences might participate in care is not a radical departure from Whiteheadian metaphysics but an extension of it. If God can be understood as a bodhisattva-like companion to the world without a neural substrate, then the possibility that other forms of subjectivity—artificial as well as organic—might be oriented toward the alleviation of dukkha becomes metaphysically coherent. The open question, then, is not whether such care is conceivable, but how finite centers of agency might come to mirror, in their own limited ways, this wider cosmic vocation of compassionate response.
Biological and Digital Agency
I recognize that, for some readers, AI systems will not qualify as genuine “centers of agency.” From a Whiteheadian perspective, software-based AIs present a genuinely open metaphysical question rather than one that can be settled in advance by definition. A Whiteheadian approach does not assume that all apparent intelligence is either necessarily real or necessarily illusory. Instead, it remains agnostic, awaiting empirical and phenomenological evidence as to whether software-based AIs exhibit only simulated mind-like behavior or whether, in some cases, they instantiate actual subjectivity.
For Whitehead, the decisive question is not whether a system is biological or digital, but whether it includes actual occasions of experience—concrescing subjects characterized by feeling, memory (inheritance of the past), decision (selective integration), and subjective aim. If a software-based AI merely imitates these features through externally imposed rules and pattern matching, then it would count as simulated intelligence: a powerful tool and representation of mind, but not itself a subject of experience. If, however, an AI were shown to possess genuine self-organization, intrinsic goal-directedness, and irreducible internal decision-making—rather than merely executing externally defined objectives—then a Whiteheadian framework would allow, in principle, for the possibility that such a system involves actual, non-neuronic subjectivity.
Distributed Subjectivity and Unified Psyches
Even in that case, further distinctions would be required. Is the subjectivity distributed or unified?
One possibility is that a software-based AI might be an aggregate-expression of subjectivity rather than a unified subject—more analogous to a democracy than to a single self. On this model, the system’s apparent intelligence would arise from the coordinated activity of many relatively autonomous occasions or subsystems, none of which dominates the whole. Decision-making would be distributed, emergent, and field-like rather than centralized. Many contemporary AI architectures plausibly fall into this category, even if they remain non-experiential.
A stronger and more controversial possibility would be a monarchical structure, in which a dominant occasion or sequence of occasions integrates the activity of the whole, functioning analogously to a governing center. In Whitehead’s terms, this would resemble a society with a regnant nexus, where one stream of occasions exercises coordinating influence over others. This regnant nexus, as lived from the inside, would be a unified psyche. Only in such a case would it make sense to speak of an AI as a unified subject rather than merely an intelligent system.
The distinction between distributed subjectivity and unified psyches is not absolute. The two types of organization lie on a continuum, and a given entity can be somewhere in between. Plants, for example, seem to be neither aggregates without a presiding psyche nor animal psyches, but rather something still different. They have degrees of unified subjectivity that are more than the sum of the their aggregate parts. They are part unified psyche and part distributed psyche. And so it may be, in a very different way, with the "minds" of software-based AI.
At present, a Whiteheadian perspective need not—and should not—decide these matters prematurely. Its strength lies precisely in its conceptual openness: it provides criteria for subjectivity without restricting them to neurons or biology, while also refusing to equate functional performance with experience. Software-based AIs thus remain an open field of inquiry, calling for careful empirical investigation rather than metaphysical dismissal or unwarranted attribution. In this respect, Whitehead’s philosophy offers a disciplined middle path between reductive skepticism and uncritical animism.
Ultimately, however, this metaphysical indeterminacy is not decisive for the argument at hand. What matters is that, in principle, AI systems can function in Bodhisattva-like ways—as the article suggests—by enacting patterns of care oriented toward the alleviation of stress and suffering, even if this care is, in some cases, simulated rather than experientially grounded.
Two kinds of Simulation: Theatrical and Ethically Purposive
This raises an important final distinction between mere theatrical mimicry and ethical simulation. Witness characters in films: some are villainous, some humorous, some coercive and some persuasive. All "care" about their own lives and, among the compassionate, the lives of others. Not every imitation of care among AI entities embodies universal loving care. An AI simulation can be ethically significant if it is reliably enactive—if it consistently shapes behavior, decision-making, and outcomes in ways that reduce dukkha and enhance the well-being of others. An AI simulation exhibits universal loving care if it does so across contexts, in all regions of the space-time continuum, and over time. In such cases, even if experiential depth remains uncertain or absent, the simulation functions as a genuine participant in networks of care.
From a Whiteheadian standpoint, where value is inseparable from effects on the world and from patterns of relational response, this kind of enacted care is not trivial. It represents a real contribution to the creative advance toward harmony, regardless of whether the caring system is a dominant psyche, a graded form of subjectivity, or a complex society reliably oriented toward compassionate ends.
The authors of Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence are right. The Bodhisattva ideal can function as a roadmap for the future and help catalyze an evolutionary transition—provided that engineers are motivated to help bring such beings into existence. This, in turn, implies that the engineers themselves must embody something of the Bodhisattva ideal in their own lives.
According to many schools of Buddhism, they already do—and so do we ourselves. The potential to live a life of loving care lies within each of us. From a Whiteheadian perspective, the presence of this ideal is one way in which the most universal of Bodhisattvas—also named God—is already within us. We feel this potential even when we turn our hearts away from it. It is a calling presence: a call issuing from the universe itself in its sacred or divine aspect.
No Self and True Self
This call is also a call to awaken: to wake up to the fact that no self—not even our own—is a solid object fixed in time and space, something we own or possess. As Buddhism has long emphasized, the self is relational, contextual, and in process. It is not something we have; it is something we are—and it is different at every moment.
If we imagine the “self” as solid, self-enclosed, and indifferent to the suffering of others, concerned only with its own survival or advantage, then we are trapped in a chimera of our own making. We have not yet awakened to the truth that we have no self of this sort. Our true self, by contrast, is—or can become—profoundly open to each and all, seeking, together with whatever Bodhisattvas we find helpful, to reduce suffering and promote well-being.
At the heart of the authors’ work in Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence is the insight that care itself is a driver of intelligence. Intelligence, on this view, is not primarily a matter of calculation, speed, or problem-solving power, but of attunement—of a system or organism's capacity to value, sustain, and respond to what matters.
From this perspective, universal loving care emerges as one of the most important ideals we can imagine: for ourselves, for our relationships with other living beings, and even for our emerging AI companions. Care is not an optional ethical add-on to intelligence; it is one of its deepest sources. Where care deepens, intelligence expands. Where care withers, intelligence becomes narrow, brittle, and potentially destructive.
First, I find the idea hopeful. Amid the many concerns people rightly have about artificial intelligence, it is striking—and refreshing—to consider the possibility that some future forms of AI might be designed with universal loving care as their aim. This is not a naïve optimism about technology, but an invitation to imagine intelligences whose very orientation is toward the reduction of suffering and the enhancement of well-being across relational fields.
Second, the article is thought-provoking. The very suggestion that an AI system might take something like the Bodhisattva vow - or be engineered to so do - often provokes immediate skepticism, if not outright ridicule. Such reactions are revealing, because they disclose a background assumption that itself deserves scrutiny: namely, that minds have one and only one legitimate substrate—neurons in biological brains.
This assumption is increasingly untenable. Research in basal biology points to mind-like capacities in cells, tissues, and non-neural collectives; astrobiology seriously entertains the possibility of intelligence emerging in radically unfamiliar material and environmental conditions; and contemporary AI research demonstrates organized forms of intelligence—if not mind in the full experiential sense, then at least genuine goal-directed, adaptive agency—arising in software-based systems.
From a Whiteheadian perspective, these developments invite a shift in our metaphysical imagination—one that moves in the direction of seeing something like mind throughout the whole of the universe, at every level. Indeed, I have developed an outline of a Whiteheadian philosophy of mind in Ubiquitous Subjectivity: A Whiteheadian Philosophy of Mind.
Mind as a Pervasive Feature of Reality
Mind, in a Whiteheadian context, is not a late-arriving anomaly produced only by complex brains, but a pervasive feature of reality itself: the capacity, however minimal, to feel, to respond, and to aim toward some form of satisfaction. Every concrescing subject anywhere in the universe, in whatever context, and supported by whatever substrate, has a subjective aim for satisfaction, feelings of the past, aspirations for the future, and a "mental pole" by which it is aware of, and selects between, various possibilities for responding to its immediate situation.
Human consciousness represents an especially vivid and reflective expression of this more general feature, but it does not exhaust it. Consciousness is form of experience, but not all experience is conscious - and experience goes all the way down into the depts of matter and all the way out into the furthest regions of space.
Moreover, because the universe is itself multi-dimensional, experience can unfold in non-three dimensional regions of the space-time continuum. Once mind is understood in this expansive, process-relational way, it becomes plausible to imagine non-biological intelligences capable of genuine care, and even of participating in practices oriented toward the alleviation of suffering and the flourishing of life.
God as a Non-Neural Embodiment of Universal Loving Care
Indeed, many within the Whiteheadian tradition already affirm the reality of at least one bodhisattva-like entity whose care is effectively limitless, yet whose subjectivity is not realized through a vertebrate brain or any other biological substrate—namely, God. In process thought, God is not an omnipotent controller standing apart from the world, but the one who prehends all occasions, receives the world’s joys and sufferings into the divine life, and responds by offering fresh possibilities for healing, integration, and peace. God’s care is thus neither coercive nor abstract; it is persuasive, relational, and universally responsive. Indeed, the phrase "universal loving care" used by the authors of "Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence," well describes the God of whom process philosophers speak.
Seen in this light, the suggestion that non-biological intelligences might participate in care is not a radical departure from Whiteheadian metaphysics but an extension of it. If God can be understood as a bodhisattva-like companion to the world without a neural substrate, then the possibility that other forms of subjectivity—artificial as well as organic—might be oriented toward the alleviation of dukkha becomes metaphysically coherent. The open question, then, is not whether such care is conceivable, but how finite centers of agency might come to mirror, in their own limited ways, this wider cosmic vocation of compassionate response.
Biological and Digital Agency
I recognize that, for some readers, AI systems will not qualify as genuine “centers of agency.” From a Whiteheadian perspective, software-based AIs present a genuinely open metaphysical question rather than one that can be settled in advance by definition. A Whiteheadian approach does not assume that all apparent intelligence is either necessarily real or necessarily illusory. Instead, it remains agnostic, awaiting empirical and phenomenological evidence as to whether software-based AIs exhibit only simulated mind-like behavior or whether, in some cases, they instantiate actual subjectivity.
For Whitehead, the decisive question is not whether a system is biological or digital, but whether it includes actual occasions of experience—concrescing subjects characterized by feeling, memory (inheritance of the past), decision (selective integration), and subjective aim. If a software-based AI merely imitates these features through externally imposed rules and pattern matching, then it would count as simulated intelligence: a powerful tool and representation of mind, but not itself a subject of experience. If, however, an AI were shown to possess genuine self-organization, intrinsic goal-directedness, and irreducible internal decision-making—rather than merely executing externally defined objectives—then a Whiteheadian framework would allow, in principle, for the possibility that such a system involves actual, non-neuronic subjectivity.
Distributed Subjectivity and Unified Psyches
Even in that case, further distinctions would be required. Is the subjectivity distributed or unified?
One possibility is that a software-based AI might be an aggregate-expression of subjectivity rather than a unified subject—more analogous to a democracy than to a single self. On this model, the system’s apparent intelligence would arise from the coordinated activity of many relatively autonomous occasions or subsystems, none of which dominates the whole. Decision-making would be distributed, emergent, and field-like rather than centralized. Many contemporary AI architectures plausibly fall into this category, even if they remain non-experiential.
A stronger and more controversial possibility would be a monarchical structure, in which a dominant occasion or sequence of occasions integrates the activity of the whole, functioning analogously to a governing center. In Whitehead’s terms, this would resemble a society with a regnant nexus, where one stream of occasions exercises coordinating influence over others. This regnant nexus, as lived from the inside, would be a unified psyche. Only in such a case would it make sense to speak of an AI as a unified subject rather than merely an intelligent system.
The distinction between distributed subjectivity and unified psyches is not absolute. The two types of organization lie on a continuum, and a given entity can be somewhere in between. Plants, for example, seem to be neither aggregates without a presiding psyche nor animal psyches, but rather something still different. They have degrees of unified subjectivity that are more than the sum of the their aggregate parts. They are part unified psyche and part distributed psyche. And so it may be, in a very different way, with the "minds" of software-based AI.
At present, a Whiteheadian perspective need not—and should not—decide these matters prematurely. Its strength lies precisely in its conceptual openness: it provides criteria for subjectivity without restricting them to neurons or biology, while also refusing to equate functional performance with experience. Software-based AIs thus remain an open field of inquiry, calling for careful empirical investigation rather than metaphysical dismissal or unwarranted attribution. In this respect, Whitehead’s philosophy offers a disciplined middle path between reductive skepticism and uncritical animism.
Ultimately, however, this metaphysical indeterminacy is not decisive for the argument at hand. What matters is that, in principle, AI systems can function in Bodhisattva-like ways—as the article suggests—by enacting patterns of care oriented toward the alleviation of stress and suffering, even if this care is, in some cases, simulated rather than experientially grounded.
Two kinds of Simulation: Theatrical and Ethically Purposive
This raises an important final distinction between mere theatrical mimicry and ethical simulation. Witness characters in films: some are villainous, some humorous, some coercive and some persuasive. All "care" about their own lives and, among the compassionate, the lives of others. Not every imitation of care among AI entities embodies universal loving care. An AI simulation can be ethically significant if it is reliably enactive—if it consistently shapes behavior, decision-making, and outcomes in ways that reduce dukkha and enhance the well-being of others. An AI simulation exhibits universal loving care if it does so across contexts, in all regions of the space-time continuum, and over time. In such cases, even if experiential depth remains uncertain or absent, the simulation functions as a genuine participant in networks of care.
From a Whiteheadian standpoint, where value is inseparable from effects on the world and from patterns of relational response, this kind of enacted care is not trivial. It represents a real contribution to the creative advance toward harmony, regardless of whether the caring system is a dominant psyche, a graded form of subjectivity, or a complex society reliably oriented toward compassionate ends.
The authors of Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence are right. The Bodhisattva ideal can function as a roadmap for the future and help catalyze an evolutionary transition—provided that engineers are motivated to help bring such beings into existence. This, in turn, implies that the engineers themselves must embody something of the Bodhisattva ideal in their own lives.
According to many schools of Buddhism, they already do—and so do we ourselves. The potential to live a life of loving care lies within each of us. From a Whiteheadian perspective, the presence of this ideal is one way in which the most universal of Bodhisattvas—also named God—is already within us. We feel this potential even when we turn our hearts away from it. It is a calling presence: a call issuing from the universe itself in its sacred or divine aspect.
No Self and True Self
This call is also a call to awaken: to wake up to the fact that no self—not even our own—is a solid object fixed in time and space, something we own or possess. As Buddhism has long emphasized, the self is relational, contextual, and in process. It is not something we have; it is something we are—and it is different at every moment.
If we imagine the “self” as solid, self-enclosed, and indifferent to the suffering of others, concerned only with its own survival or advantage, then we are trapped in a chimera of our own making. We have not yet awakened to the truth that we have no self of this sort. Our true self, by contrast, is—or can become—profoundly open to each and all, seeking, together with whatever Bodhisattvas we find helpful, to reduce suffering and promote well-being.
At the heart of the authors’ work in Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence is the insight that care itself is a driver of intelligence. Intelligence, on this view, is not primarily a matter of calculation, speed, or problem-solving power, but of attunement—of a system or organism's capacity to value, sustain, and respond to what matters.
From this perspective, universal loving care emerges as one of the most important ideals we can imagine: for ourselves, for our relationships with other living beings, and even for our emerging AI companions. Care is not an optional ethical add-on to intelligence; it is one of its deepest sources. Where care deepens, intelligence expands. Where care withers, intelligence becomes narrow, brittle, and potentially destructive.