Designing with Death in Mind: Toward Coherent Architectures of Intelligence

As artificial intelligence advances toward generative creativity, embodied autonomy, and cognitive sophistication, a deeper question resurfaces: What is intelligence—and how should it be oriented within planetary and civilizational life? This paper argues that contemporary AI trajectories remain limited by the epistemic assumptions of Enlightenment modernity, which frame intelligence as conquest, cognition as isolation, and agency as optimization. Drawing from Indian philosophical traditions—including Sāṃkhya, Mahāyāna Buddhism, Trika philosophy of the layered structure of Vāc—we offer an alternative view: intelligence as dharmic resonance—an ethically attuned, relational unfolding that aligns cognition with the coherence of life itself. We engage two influential theoretical models: Gabora and Bach’s theory of autocatalytic, generative selves, and Ororbia and Friston’s framework of mortal computation grounded in the Free Energy Principle. While the former emphasizes structural creativity and self-organization, and the latter foregrounds thermodynamic embodiment and constraint, both models fall short of articulating a meta-ethical orientation. By bringing them into conversation with a dharmic-relational ontology, we propose a new synthesis: intelligence as participatory coherence, responsive to karmic consequence, ecological embeddedness, and civilizational memory. This reorientation reframes AI not as artificial general intelligence, but as a planetary design project—one that calls for humility, mortality-aware systems, and the capacity to remember and realign. Intelligence, in this light, is not what we compute—it is what we become.