Interdependence. From Buddhism to AI in the military domain.

From Buddhism to AI in the military domain, passing through ecology, memory studies, and quantum physics. There is one idea that is going all the way up from ancient Buddhist texts to drive contemporary academic contributions in different fields of knowledge: the concept of interdependence.

“Because beings are sick, I am sick. If living beings are no longer sick, my sickness will automatically be cured.”

The Teaching of Vimalakīrti (Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa)

This is the answer of Vimalakīrti to a monk who inquired about his health conditions. Vimalakīrti is a bodhisattva, which is an enlightened being (In Sanskrit, bodhi = enlightenment and sattva = being). Someone who, according to Buddhism, has reached the highest degree of consciousness. Vimalakīrti is the main character of an ancient Buddhist text, which takes its name from Vimalakīrti itself: the teaching of Vimalakīrti (Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa). This text is one of the most important texts within the Mahāyāna tradition of Buddhism.

Now, skipping the whole explanation about the different traditions and the whole meaning behind the quote of the bodhisattva, I only want to point out one idea contained in the quote, which is also one basic idea of Buddhism: every being is made up of all the other beings. This is the reason why Vimalakīrti is sick and cannot recover as long as all the other beings get well.

This idea, which is something like two thousand years old, not only applies to living beings but to things in general. Everything originates along with all the other things. You cannot consider something as such, but it is as if everything exists within a network of things. According to Thich Nhat Hanh (1926-2022), who was a contemporary buddhist that interpreted this same idea in his own (radical) way, interdipendence, or Inter-Being, as he calls it, means that when you think of a tree, “inside” the tree there is the water that has been nurtured it since it was just a seed, the sun and its rays which helped the photosynthesis, the wind, the person who planted the seed, the parents of this person, the food ate by the parents of the person and so on. Everything exists within that tree. You must be aware of the existence of a whole macrocosm within each microcosm.

Once again, I’ll skip the deep dive into what this concept means in Buddhism, but here’s the core idea: everything exists in relation to everything else. It might sound simple, but it’s actually a really powerful insight. In fact, it’s shaping a lot of current academic work across all sorts of fields. Personally, I think it’s playing a big role in helping us get closer to understanding how things really are. I’ll share just a few examples I’ve come across.

In the book Helgoland, the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli (1956-) discusses this same idea. Quoting Nâgârjuna (c. 150 – c. 250 CE), author of some of the texts that founded the Mahāyāna school, Rovelli explains that we should think of phenomena in terms of their relations with all the other phenomena. The fact is that the book is not about Buddhism but quantum physics. Indeed, Rovelli explains how the idea of interdependence proves to be crucial in understanding relational quantum mechanics. Basically, the idea is that when you study a phenomenon, you always have to take into account the system but also the observer.

Arne Naess (1912-2009), Norwegian philosopher, coined the term Deep Ecology. Naess was committed to promoting and advocating a respect for nature and theorizing a philosophical system to create a sort of harmony between human beings and the environment. The fundamental idea of Naess, guess? It’s that there exists an interconnectedness between things on an ontological level. Arne Naess was inspired by Spinoza, on one side, for the logical formulation of his thought and the systematic approach, and Buddhism on the other side, for the same idea of taking into account the whole instead of the single part and interdependence. To simply explain what ontology is and what that means in this context, ontology is a branch of logic, describing things as such. For instance, I cannot think of a triangle without three sides. I cannot think of a tree without its roots. In this sense, we can say that having three sides and having roots are ontological features of a triangle and a tree, respectively. In the case of Arne Naess – and the next cases – we talk about ontological relationality. It means that you cannot think of a human being, it cannot exist as a human being, without being in a network, a web of relations. So, being in relations with all the other beings is an ontological feature of a human being; that is, relationality is a feature that describes every human being as such.

Ok, explanation done – hope that’s clear btw – I’ve recently come across two other crazy cases, but I could really make a lot of examples. Moreover, in the examples so far, there was an explicit reference to Buddhism, while there is not in the following ones. We could maybe think that the idea actually got integrated within the Western system of thought, also because quantum physics and Deep Ecology came chronologically earlier than the next examples.

Recently, I read a academic paper in Memory Studies, which developed a theory to study the use of social media by activist groups, by what are defined as ‘mnemonic affordances’. The idea developed from the assumption that you have the social media (the system, or the enviroment), with some features, the user (the observer, or the human being), who can use the social media, but you have to study how the user actually interact with the social’s features. So there might be some features, but what is important is how they are used; again, it is most important the relationship between the social media and the user.

Last example: AI in the military domain. Back in June 2025, I attended a conference about the regulation of AI in the military world. There was a lot of talk about what the military knows when it comes to using a weapon. But the part that really matters – and you probably already know where I’m going with this – is how the soldier actually uses, interacts with, the weapon. It is not really about what the weapon infused with AI or whatever can actually do. It’s all about relations. By the way, these two last examples are also really interesting because they show how this idea of interdependence explains, and it is very useful in understanding how the human being basically relates to technology.

All in all, I find it really fascinating how this idea has traveled over time. What’s also interesting is that, once it made its way into the Western world, it seemed to pick up some extra layers – especially through more formal, logical ways of thinking. It started being associated with ontology. Indeed, Thich Nhat Hanh explains the concept of interdependence, doing so by highlighting its anti-logical nature. Let’s take the most basic principle of logic, the principle of identity A = A. According to Nhat Hanh, the principle falls apart, because A (tree) is not only A, but also B(sun rays), C(water), D(farmer who planted the seed), etc. On the other hand, however, it is not totally surprising if we consider that the Western philosophical tradition is often described as having reason and logical thinking as its main distinctive traits.