Yogācāra Philosophy and Technology: Rethinking Agency, Recursion, and Responsibility

Debates about artificial intelligence tend to revolve around a recurring set of concerns: agency, consciousness, and the proper locus of responsibility. This paper brings classical Yogācāra philosophy into conversation with these discussions — not as a metaphysical doctrine but as a conceptual toolkit for analyzing layered cognitive structures. Drawing on Yogācāra accounts of recursive conditioning and appropriative self-grasping, I argue that advanced AI systems are better understood as stratified architectures of patterned activation than as emergent subjects. This framing makes the distinction between functional recursion and reflexive appropriation philosophically available in a way that much current discourse lacks. By situating technological systems within a model of conditioned emergence, the paper redistributes agency across socio-technical networks and refines ethical analysis without attributing subjectivity to machines — demonstrating, in the process, how Buddhist philosophical resources can function as genuine conceptual engineering within contemporary technology discourse.