In my conversation with Alakh Puri for Inflection Point, he asked me about the place of Indian spiritual culture in this process. The real advantage in looking at India is that we have an amazing textual record of almost everything, and until a few hundred years ago that record was entirely oral. To carry a colossal textual record by oral transmission, there have to be devices in speech: matras, beats, syllables, accents, rhymes and harmonies.
So we created a culture of commentary in India that addresses almost every aspect of human thinking, and it reaches even the most advanced aspects of our modern culture, such as AI. There is a direct link between AI and the rishi Pāṇini and his Ashtadhyayi, composed more than 2,500 years ago, and 2,500 years of commentary on it: meta-language, and the relationship of speech and mathematics, which the West has discovered only in the last 150 years, coming to Pāṇini’s theory of recursivity as late as 1939, 1940. The concept of placing a rule within a rule goes back 2,500 years to Pāṇini and Indian culture.
Other cultures don’t have to copy India or think like Indians. If we think of our own cultures and civilizations with that same depth of analysis, discourse and commentary, India becomes a role model, not something to be imitated.
Subtitles in English, Hindi, Konkani, Serbian and Russian: choose your language with the buttons under the video. The full conversation with Alakh Puri is coming to Inflection Point.