Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
- Numerai: https://numer.ai/lex
- Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings
- MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off
- AG1: https://drinkag1.com/lex to get 1 month supply of fish oil

TRANSCRIPT:
https://lexfridman.com/joscha-bach-3-transcript

EPISODE LINKS:
Joscha's Twitter: https://twitter.com/Plinz
Joscha's Website: http://bach.ai
Joscha's Substack: https://substack.com/@joscha

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:15 - Stages of life
13:37 - Identity
20:12 - Enlightenment
26:43 - Adaptive Resonance Theory
33:31 - Panpsychism
43:31 - How to think
51:25 - Plants communication
1:09:20 - Fame
1:34:57 - Happiness
1:42:15 - Artificial consciousness
1:54:23 - Suffering
1:59:08 - Eliezer Yudkowsky
2:06:44 - e/acc (Effective Accelerationism)
2:12:21 - Mind uploading
2:23:11 - Vision Pro
2:27:25 - Open source AI
2:40:17 - Twitter
2:47:33 - Advice for young people
2:50:29 - Meaning of life

SOCIAL:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman
- Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman
- Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/lexfridman
- Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman

There is a certain perspective where you might be thinking what is the longest possible game that you

A short game is, for instance, cancer is playing a shorter game than your organism.

It's cancer is an organism playing a shorter game than the regular organism, and because the cancer cannot procreate beyond the organism, except for some infectious cancers, like the ones that eradicated the Tasmanian devils, you typically end up with a situation where the organism dies together with the cancer, because the cancer has destroyed the larger system due to playing a shorter game.

And so ideally you want to, I think, build agents that play the longest possible games.

And the longest possible games is to keep entropy at bay as long as possible by doing interesting stuff.

The following is a conversation with Yosha Bach, his third time on this podcast.

Yosha is 1 of the most brilliant and fascinating minds in the world, exploring the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and computation.

And he's 1 of my favorite humans to talk to about pretty much anything and everything.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Yosha Bach.

You wrote a post about levels of lucidity.

Quote, as we grow older, it becomes apparent that our self-reflexive mind is not just gradually accumulating ideas about itself, but that it progresses in somewhat distinct stages.

Stage 3, social self, adolescence, domesticated adult.

Stage 4 is rational agency, self-direction.

Stage 5 is self-authoring, that's full adult.

You've achieved wisdom, but there's 2 more stages.

Stage 6 is enlightenment, stage 7 is transcendence.

Can you explain each, or the interesting parts of each of these stages?

And what's your sense why there are stages of this, of lucidity as we progress through life in this too short life?

This model is derived from a concept by the psychologist Robert Keegan, And he talks about the development of the self as a process that happens in principle by some kind of reverse engineering of a mind where you gradually become aware of yourself and thereby build structure that allows you to interact deeper with the world and yourself.

I found myself using this model not so much as a developmental model.

I'm not even sure if it's a very good developmental model because I saw my children not progressing exactly like that.

I also suspect that you don't go through the stages necessarily in succession, and it's not that you work through 1 stage and then you get into the next 1.

Sometimes you revisit them, sometimes stuff is happening in parallel.

But it's, I think, a useful framework to look at what's present in the structure of a person and how they interact with the world and how they relate to themselves.

So it's more like a philosophical framework that allows you to talk about how minds work.

And at first, when we are born, we don't have a personal self yet, I think.

Instead, we have an attentional self, and this attentional self is initially in the infant tasked with building a world model, and also an initial model of the self.

But mostly it's building a game engine in the brain that is tracking sensory data and uses it to explain it.

And in some sense, you could compare it to game engine like Minecraft or so, so colors and sounds, people are all not physical objects.

They are creation of our mind at a certain level of coarse graining, models that are mathematical, that use geometry and that use manipulation of objects and so on to create scenes in which we can find ourselves and interact with them.

Yeah, and this personal self is something that is more or less created after the world is finished, after it's trained into the system, after it has been constructed.

And this personal self is an agent that interacts with the outside world.

And the outside world is not the world of quantum mechanics, not the physical universe, but it's the model that has been generated in our own mind.

And we experience ourselves interacting with that outside world that is created inside of our own mind.

And outside of ourself, there's feelings and they presented our interface to this outside world.

These feelings are basically attitudes that our mind is computing that tell us what's needed in the world, the things that we are drawn to, the things that we are afraid of.

And we are tasked with solving this problem of satisfying the needs, avoiding the aversions, following on our inner commitments and so on, and also modeling ourselves and building the next stage.

So after we have this personal self in stage 2 online, many people form a social self.

And this social self allows the individual to experience themselves as part of a group.

It's basically this thing that when you are playing in a team, for instance, you don't notice yourself just as a single note that is reaching out into the world, but you're also looking down.

You're looking down from this entire group and you see how this group is looking at this individual.

And everybody in the group is in some sense emulating this group spirit to some degree.

And in this state, people are forming their opinions by assimilating them from this group mind.

They basically gain the ability to act a little bit like a hive mind.

But are you also modeling the interaction of how opinions shapes and forms through the interaction of the individual nodes within the group?

Yeah, it's basically the way in which people do it in this stage is that they experience what are the opinions of my environment, they experience the relationship that I have to their environment, and they resonate with people around them, and get more opinions through this interaction, through the way in which they relate to others.

And at stage 4, you basically understand that stuff is true and false independently of what other people believe and you have agency over your own beliefs in that stage.

You basically discover epistemology, the rules about determining what's true and false.

Yes, I mean at some level you're always thinking, you are constructing things.

And I believe that this ability to reason about your mental representation is what we mean by thinking.

It's an intrinsically reflexive process that requires consciousness.

You can generate the content of feelings and so on outside of consciousness.

It's very hard to be conscious of how your feelings emerge, at least in the early stages of development, but thoughts is something that you always control.

And if you are a nerd like me, you often have to skip stage 3 because you'd lack the intuitive empathy with others.

Because in order to resonate with a group, you need to have a quite similar architecture.

And if people are via differently, then it's hard for them to resonate with other people and basically have empathy, which is not the same as compassion, but it is a shared perceptual mental state.

Empathy happens not just via influence about the mental states of others, but it's a perception of what other people feel and where they're at.

Can't you not have empathy while also not having a similar architecture, cognitive architecture as the others in the group?

I think yes, but I experienced that too, but you need to build something that is like a meta-architecture.

You need to be able to embrace the architecture of the other to some degree, or find some shared common ground.

And it's also this issue that if you are a nerd, normally often, as in your typical people, have difficulty to resonate with you.

And as a result, they have difficulty understanding you unless they have enough wisdom to feel what's going on there.

Well, aren't we, isn't the whole process of the stage 3 to figure out the API to the other humans that have different architecture and you yourself publish public documentation for the API that people can interact with for you?

My experience as a child growing up was that I did not find any way to interface with the stage 3 people, and they didn't do that with me.

KS Yeah, of course, I tried it very hard.

But it was only when I entered a mathematics school at ninth grade, lots of other nerds were present, that I found people that I could deeply resonate with and had the impression that, yes, I have friends now, I found my own people.

And before that, I felt extremely alone in the world.

There was basically nobody I could connect to.

And I remember there was 1 moment in all these years where I was in, there was a school exchange and it was a Russian boy, a kid from the Russian garrison stationed in Eastern Germany who visited our school.

And we played a game of chess against each other.

And we looked into each other's eyes and we sat there for 2 hours playing this game of chess.

And I had the impression, this is a human being.

I wonder if your life could have been different if you knew that it's okay to be different, to have a different architecture?

Whether like accepting that the interface is hard to figure out, takes a long time to figure out, and it's okay to be different, in fact, it's beautiful to be different.

My main concern was mostly that I was alone.

It was not so much the question, is it okay to be the way I am?

I couldn't do much about it, so I had to deal with it.

But my main issue was that I was not sure if I would ever meet anybody growing up that I would connect to at such a deep level that I would feel that I could belong.

So there's a visceral, undeniable feeling of being alone.

Yes, and I noticed the same thing when I came into the math school, that I think at least half, probably 2 thirds, of these kids were severely traumatized as children growing up, and in large part due to being alone, because they couldn't find anybody to relate to.

Don't you think everybody's alone deep down?

It took me some time to update and to get over the trauma and so on, but I felt that in my 20s, I had lots of friends and I had my place in the world and I had no longer doubts that I would never be alone again.

Is there some aspect to which we're alone together?

You don't see a deep loneliness inside yourself still?

Okay, so that's the nonlinear progression through the stages, I suppose.

And so basically I find that many nerds jump straight into stage 4, bypassing stage 3.

The question is basically, do you stay a little bit autistic, or do you catch up?

And I believe you can catch up, you can build this missing structure and basically experience yourself as part of a group, learn intuitive empathy and develop the sense, this perceptual sense of feeling what other people feel.

And before that, I could only basically feel this when I was deeply in love with somebody and we synced or.

So there's a lot of friction to feeling that way.

Like it only with certain people as opposed to it comes naturally,

But this is something that basically later I felt started to resolve itself for me to a large degree.

In many ways, growing up and paying attention.

I had some very crucial experiences in getting close to people, building connections,

So really paying attention to the, what is it, to the feeling another human being fully.

Loving other people and being loved by other people and building a space in which you can be safe and can experiment and touch a lot and be close to somebody a lot.

And over time, basically at some point you realize, oh, it's no longer that I feel locked out, but I feel connected and I experience where somebody else is at.

And normally my mind is racing very fast at a high frequency, so it's not always working like this.

Sometimes it works better, sometimes it works less.

It's more, it's interesting to observe myself, which frequency I'm at, and at which mode somebody else is at.

Yeah, man, the mind is so beautiful in that way.

Sometimes it comes so natural to me, so easy to pay attention, pay attention to the world fully, to other people fully.

And sometimes the stress over silly things is overwhelming.

It's so interesting that the mind is that roller coaster in that way.

At stage 5 you discover how identity is constructed.

You realize that your values are not terminal but they are instrumental to achieving a world that you like and aesthetics that you prefer.

And the more you understand this, the more you get agency over how your identity is constructed.

And you realize that identity and interpersonal interaction is a costume.

And you should be able to have agency over that costume.

It's useful to be a costume, it tells something to others and it allows to interface and roles, but being locked into this is a big limitation.

The word costume kind of implies that it's fraudulent in some way.

In some sense I learned a lot about costumes at Burning Man.

Before that I did not really appreciate costumes and saw them more as uniforms, like wearing a suit if you are working in a bank or if you are trying to get startup funding from a VC in Switzerland, right?

Then you dress up in a particular way and this is mostly to show the other side that you are willing to play by the rules and you understand what the rules are.

When you are at Burning Man, your costume becomes self-expression and there is no boundary to the self-expression.

You're basically free to wear what you want to express other people what you feel like this day and what kind of interactions you want to have.

That's very hard to say because the costume also depends on what other people see in the costume.

And this depends on the context that the other people understand.

And you have to create something if you want to that is legible to the other side, and that means something to yourself.

Some people do, but I think that once you realize that you wear a costume at Burning Man, a variety of costumes, realize that you cannot not wear a costume.

Basically everything that you wear and present to others is something that is to some degree an addition to what you are deep inside.

So this stage, in parentheses, you put full adult comma wisdom.

Why would you say this is full and why is it wisdom?

It does allow you to understand why other people have different identities from yours.

And it allows you to understand that the difference between people who vote for different parties and might have very different opinions and different value systems, is often the accident of where they are born and what happened after that to them and what traits they got before they were born.

And At some point you realize the perspective where you understand that everybody could be you in a different timeline if you just flip those bits.

How easy is it to do costume changes throughout the day?

It's just a matter of energy and interest.

When you are wearing your pajamas and you switch out of your pajamas into say a work short and pants, you're making a costume change, right?

And if you are putting on a gown, you're making a costume change.

And you could do the same with personality?

There are people which have multiple personalities for interaction in multiple worlds, right?

So if somebody works in a store and you put up a storekeeper personality, when you're presenting yourself at work, you develop a sub-personality for this.

And the social persona for many people is in some sense a puppet that they're playing like a marionette.

And if they play this all the time, they might forget that there is something behind this, there's something what it feels like to be in your skin.

And I guess it's very helpful if you're able to get back into this.

And for me, The other way around is relatively hard for me.

It's pretty hard to learn how to play consistent social roles.

So basically when you are wearing a costume at Burning Man and say you are an extraterrestrial prince, there's something where you are expressing in some sense something that's closer to yourself than the way in which you hide yourself behind standard clothing when you go out in the city and the default world.

And so this costume that you're wearing at Burning Man allows you to express more of yourself and you have a shorter distance of advertising to people what kind of person you are, what kind of interaction you would want to have with them.

And so you get much earlier into media stress.

And I believe it's regrettable that we do not use the opportunities that we have with custom-made clothing now to wear costumes that are much more stylish, that are much more custom-made, that are not necessarily part of a fashion in which you express which milieu you're part of and how up to date you are, but you also express how you are as an individual and what you want to do today and how you feel today and what you intend to do about it.

Well, isn't it easier now in the digital world to explore different costumes?

I mean, that's the kind of idea with virtual reality, that's the idea even with Twitter in two-dimensional screens.

You can swap out costumes, you can be as weird as you want.

For Burning Man, you have to order things, you have to make things, you have to, it's more effort to put on.

It's even better if you make them yourselves.

Sure, but it's just easier to do digitally, right?

It's not about easy, it's about how to get it right.

And for me, the first Burning Man experience, I got adopted by a bunch of people in Boston who dragged me to Burning Man.

And we spent a few weekends doing costumes together.

And that was an important part of the experience where the camp bonded, that people got to know each other, and we basically grew into the experience that we would have later.

So the extraterrestrial prince is based on a true story.

Stage 6, at some point you can collapse the division between self, personal self and world generator again.

And a lot of people get there via meditation or some of them get there via psychedelics, some of them by accident, and you suddenly notice that you are not actually a person, but you are a vessel that can create a person.

And the person is still there, you observe that personal self, but you observe the personal self from the outside.

And you might also notice that the world that is being created is a representation.

If not, then you might experience that I am the universe, I am the thing that is creating everything.

And of course, what you are creating is not quantum mechanics and the physical universe.

What you are creating is this game engine that is updating the world and you are creating your valence, your feelings, and all the people inside of that world, including the person that you identify with yourself in this world.

Are you creating the game engine or are you noticing the game engine?

You notice how you're generating the game engine.

And I mean, when you are dreaming at night, you can, if you have a lucid dream, you can learn how to do this deliberately.

And in principle, you can also do it during the day.

And the reason why we don't get to do this from the beginning and why we don't have agency of our feelings right away is because we would game it before they have the necessary amount of wisdom to deal with creating this dream that we are in.

to get access to cheat codes too quickly.

So stage 5 is already pretty rare and stage 6 is even more rare.

You basically find this mostly with advanced Buddhist meditators and so on that are dropping into the stage and can induce it at will and spend time in it.

So stage 5 requires a good therapist, stage 6 requires a good Buddhist spiritual leader.

For instance, could be that is the right thing to do.

But it's not that these stages give you scores or levels that you need to advance to.

You live your life in the mode that works best at any given moment.

And when your mind decides that you should have a different configuration, then it's building that configuration.

And for many people, they stay happily at stage 3 and experience themselves as part of groups, and there's nothing wrong with this.

And for some people, this doesn't work, and they're forced to build more agency over their rational beliefs than this and construct their norms rationally.

And stage 7 is something that is more or less hypothetical.

That would be the stage in which it's basically a transhumanist stage in which you understand how you work, in which the mind fully realizes how it's implemented and can also in principle enter different modes in which it could be implemented.

And that's the stage that as far as I understand is not open to people yet.

Oh, but it is possible through the process

Yes, and who knows if there are biological agents that are working at different time scales than us that basically become aware of the way in which they're implemented on ecosystems and can change that implementation and have agency over how they're implemented in the world.

And what I find interesting about the discussion about AI alignment, that it seems to be following the status very much.

Most people seem to be in stage 3, also according to Robert Keegan.

I think he says that about 85% of people are in stage 3 and stay there.

And if you're in stage 3 and your opinions are the result of social assimilation, then what you're mostly worried about in the AI is that the AI might have the wrong opinions.

So if the AI says something racist or sexist, we are all lost because we will assimilate the wrong opinions from the AI.

And so we need to make sure that the AI has the right opinions and the right values and the right structure.

And if you're at that stage 4, that's not your main concern.

And so most nerds don't really worry about the algorithmic bias and the model that it picks up, because if there's something wrong with this bias, the AI ultimately will prove it.

At some point, we'll get it there that it makes mathematical proofs about reality, and then it will figure out what's true and what's false.

But you're still worried that AI might turn you into paperclips, because it might have the wrong values.

So if it's set up with the wrong function that controls its direction in the world, then it might do something that is completely horrible and there's no easy way to fix it.

So that's more like a stage 4 rationalist kind of worry.

And if you are at stage 5, you're mostly worried that the AI is not going to be enlightened fast enough because you realize that the game is not so much about intelligence, but about agency, about the ability to control the future.

And the identity is instrumental to this.

And if you are a human being, I think at some level you ought to choose your own identity.

You should not have somebody else pick the costume for you and then wear it.

But instead, you should be mindful about what you want to be in this world.

And I think if you are an agent that is fully malleable, that can provide its own source code, like an AI might do at some point, then the identity that you will have is whatever you can be.

And in this way, the AI will maybe become everything, like a planetary control system.

See all Lex Fridman transcripts on Youtube

Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans | Lex Fridman Podcast #392