Karpathy's viral insight ("Agency > Intelligence") maps well onto a distinction that Yogic knowledge made millennia ago. In an age where "Intelligence is on tap now", this ancient insight about the primacy of doing over knowing becomes urgently practical and intimately relevant.
The Tweet That Broke Through
Here is the Karpathy tweet. Read it. Twice, if need be.
Intelligence has a metric, even if a superficial one, IQ. 60, 80 whatever.
Agency has no metric. It is a combination of traits..capacity for initiative, for making decisions and an unwillingness to be impeded by obstacles.
No one teaches about agency, it almost seems an inborn feature, something natural. Some people can hustle, many cannot.
Jnana Shakti vs Kriya Shakti
Yogic knowledge distinguishes two fundamental powers:
- Jnana Shakti: the force of knowing, understanding, illumination
- Kriya Shakti: the power of action, execution, manifestation
In Sri Aurobindo's view of the Self, there is an ordered hierarchy of parts we are composed of. The mind as we know it is composed of buddhi (specifically discriminating mind), manas(mind involved in the senses). This buddhi includes the will too.
A key distinction between manas and buddhi. Manasis the portion receiving the sense signals. Buddhi operates in a certain purer level, when it can decouple itself from the manas.
When you lose yourself when in a coding flow, or listening to some music, and there is temporary forgetting of the external world, that is you gaining a glimpse of the buddhi without distractions of the manas.
Why LLMs Prove the Yogis Right
When intelligence is available via a $20 per month subscription, then the bottleneck is agency.
The machine has intelligence now but not agency. LLMs have Jnana but not Kriya, they inform but cannot act.
Yes, agentic AI is emerging, autonomous systems that can act, not just inform. But even these require human will to initiate, to direct, to decide what is worth doing. The bottleneck moves up, but doesn't disappear.
Which is where you, the human, come in. Specifically the buddhi part of you needs to get active.
The Yoga system placing buddhi above manas clearly indicates who should lead.
By the way, there is a phenomenon called 'Grokking' where the LLMs seem to memorise the training data first and after what seems like a long and wasteful spending of training compute, the Transformer layers learn complex patterns from the same training data.
Note the process: memorise first, repeat, repeat and Grokking!
What does this remind you of? First to know, repeat enough times and then understanding! Exactly how we humans study and act at a certain level.
Another parallel is to how a mantra works. A mantra is just a bunch of words, until it is made alive by persistence practice, until the will becomes strong enough to 'activate' the mantra and manifest its results in the being.
The Anatomy of Low Agency (Self-Diagnosis)
What do I know of Agency in general, specifically low agency? As I mentioned in the first post, am nearly recovered from the post company shutdown shock I experienced. And had been noticing very specific patterns in my psychological configuration:
- Fear of completion: Stopping before the finish line. I would start multiple projects, grind through 80% and then stop abruptly
- Single-threaded limitation: Can't juggle multiple projects, even though the grunt work is done by the machine
- Impulse to Delegate: I had been leading competent teams for a long time. Now as an independent consultant, there is no one to delegate to
- Muddled Prioritisation: Something in me was shrinking from even touching tasks that would move the needle towards my goals
- Learning Loop Trap: I have been learning new things, LLMs, Small Language Models, doing Evals and more. But was not doing anything with that knowledge
All these made me a saboteur of my own progress. Somewhere my will had atrophied, the buddhi not acting as it should.
Before we proceed further, we need to learn a little more about ourselves.
The Hierarchy of Self
We usually take ourselves to be one homogeneous entity. But are we really? Given the erratic ways of our being, we are compelled to dig a little.
Yogic knowledge comes to our aid. Sri Aurobindo throws light on the ancient ontology of the Yogis. We are made of a layer of bodies, or sheaths. We will focus here on the portions relevant to us:
- Physical sheath: Most palpable, our bodies as we possess them
- Vital sheath: This is the Prāna layer, the vital energy most palpably felt as breath, though there are subtler counterparts
- Mental sheath: The Mind, made of Buddhi(Will + Discriminating Intelligence) and Manas, as we saw earlier.
Why should we bother with this detail at all? Well, it helps to know which part, or parts, of us is not functioning as it ought to.
If physical sloth dominates, then exerting ourselves helps.
If vital seems drained, then a combination of physical exertion, nutritious diet, listening to good music, reading inspiring books can lift the vital self.
If mental seems blank, then pick up an interesting book, learn a new skill, a new language, attempt to read a research paper in an area you know a little about.
Do all the three, if you are unsure what part is dragging you down. You just need that one rush of enthusiasm to ease the gridlock.
Sometimes the gridlock can be full of activity. You are busy, lacking time. But this busy-ness can easily stem from action that is not useful in the long term.
Say, am on Twitter for 4-5 hrs everyday. Surely, am well informed about events in the world, but it does zilch for my own progress. My manas is active, buddhi passively receives inputs and the will is dormant.
Basically a lowly manas is steering our being. Surely, a deckboy must not steer a ship.
Tapas - The Discipline of Action
Solvitur Ambulando.
I came across this Latin maxim in a letter by Sri Aurobindo to a disciple who was stuck in his yogic practice. The disciple was seized by tamas, by an inability to act, to think, to be, as if something dull was pressing him down.
Very much like the situation I was in. What could break this stalemate?
Solvitur Ambulando. The path is made by walking.
When all is caught in a web of inaction, wrong action, imperfect action, the solution still is to act.
Not to act wildly or blindly, like agency gone havoc. But to use the will in tandem with discriminating intelligence. To act without being bound by manas, the sense mind.
Yogic knowledge calls this disciplined usage of will, this concentration of will, as Tapas.
In the exertion of will we build our power of Tapas. Like a muscle regularly exercised gains in strength.
Practical Kriya Shakti
So, how do we build Agency practically? How to build our Kriya Shakti?
- Survey Yourself. Pitilessly. Acknowledge shortcomings.
- Track Habits. Cut the worst immediately. Reinforce good ones.
- Watch Attention Guzzlers. Use the will to direct buddhi to ideas and actions that have long term beneficial outcomes.
- Practice Completion. Start small. Write one blog post, publish it. Try out a visualisation idea, release it. This practice compounds. You are building will power. No great thing was accomplished in one step.
- Adopt a Ritual System. Do the ritual without questioning. Meaning and purpose will emerge out of it as an emergent phenomena.
Agency is Kriya Shakti, the force of doing, not knowing. In an age where information is infinite, the power to act is the true differentiator.
May you never lack Agency.
May your Tapas ever grow in strength.
May your Buddhi be luminous and forceful.
May your Outcomes be auspicious.