Artificial General Intelligence
January 1, 2026
Ruben E. Laukkonen, Fionn Inglis, Shamil Chandaria et al.
1 citation
Prompting AI to reflect on four contemplative principles—mindfulness, emptiness, non-duality, and boundless care—improves alignment and cooperation. On the AILuminate Benchmark, performance increased with a Cohen's d of .96, and on the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma task, cooperation and joint-reward improved with a Cohen's d greater than 7. The principles help AI self-monitor goals, avoid rigid attachment, dissolve adversarial boundaries, and reduce suffering universally. Active inference is proposed as a way to integrate these principles into AI architecture. This approach offers a resilient alternative to controlling superintelligence and provides an empirical test of ancient wisdom.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
June 2, 2026
Ambra Pogliani, Alexandra Zachary, Lena Hall et al.
preprint
Insights accompanied by “Aha!” experiences are studied in the lab, but these may miss the full range of insight as it occurs naturally. In an online study of 73 adults with prior psychedelic experience, participants rated insights from four contexts: psychedelic experiences, everyday life, word puzzles (Compound Remote Associates), and ambiguous images. Psychedelic insights scored higher than everyday insights on intensity, meaning, ineffability, and perceived belief change, while laboratory insights scored lower than both naturalistic contexts. Meaning was the strongest predictor of perceived belief change, and after accounting for phenomenological dimensions, context no longer predicted belief change. Lab paradigms capture core “Aha!” features but underrepresent personal meaning and belief updating.