The crucial question in self-driving cars: who programs their ethics?
The same question is the birthplace of the awareness path ‘Liber’. Who is actually at the controls of what you think and feel? And if you now say: ‘that is myself’, what or who is that, that ‘self’? How free and autonomous is this ‘self’ to want what it wants?
Like the self-driving car, Liber does not think the ‘of self-driving person’ is a sensible idea. That is: the human being who is not aware of his thinker and thinking from a distance. Because in that state of being unconscious, not your free and authentic, but your programmed self controls you. Which makes you a hazard on the road. After all, there are always circumstances that arise that were not yet there at the time of your programming.
Do you constantly control yourself and maybe your environment? It is not surprising. The ‘self-propelled human being’ is like a flat head screwdriver tirelessly trying to screw in a Phillips head screw.
Home in three steps
‘A hack’, I learned from Marleen Stikker, ‘is an elegant solution to a complex problem’. In that sense, Liber is also a hack. It only takes three steps to break free from an automated attitude to life. Firstly, the acknowledgment that you do not know more than you do, but that nevertheless your well-knowing determines your life. Next: the verbalization of your knowing. Let it express itself and show itself to the fullest. And finally, practice step three, to enter into a completely unknowing relationship with all your well-knowing. Learn to relate as not-knowing to your well-knowing.
The outcome: a reset, an update, from your knowledge.
So Liber does not teach you to go through life without an ‘I’ or ‘self’, but to keep updating it. The mysterious, if not mystical of the matter: not knowing another brings what we think we know up to date, but a not-knowing. Bringing this (thinking to) know and thus (thinking to) know into conversation with each other and it leads at best to a hybrid. But marriage expresses your knowledge to your not-knowing, and the child of that association bears witness to real originality and originality.
If you read about self-driving cars or computers that are going to take over from us, before you judge them, ask yourself in the future: how automated do I actually go through life?
