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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:33 - Life is hard
2:56 - Consciousness
9:42 - What is life?
19:51 - Free will
33:56 - Simulation
36:06 - Base layer of reality
51:42 - Boston Dynamics
1:00:01 - Engineering consciousness
1:10:30 - Suffering
1:19:24 - Postmodernism
1:23:43 - Psychedelics
1:36:57 - GPT-3
1:45:40 - GPT-4
1:52:05 - OpenAI Codex
1:54:20 - Humans vs AI: Who is more dangerous?
2:11:04 - Hitler
2:16:01 - Autonomous weapon systems
2:23:29 - Mark Zuckerberg
2:29:04 - Love
2:43:18 - Michael Malice and anarchism
3:00:15 - Love
3:04:23 - Advice for young people
3:09:00 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Yosha Bach, his second time on the podcast.

the most fascinating minds in the world, exploring the nature of intelligence, cognition, computation, and consciousness.

To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors, Coinbase, Codecademy, Linode, NetSuite, and ExpressVPN.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Yosha Bach.

Thank you for once again coming on to this particular Russian program and sticking to the theme of a Russian program.

You wrote that, quote, "'When life feels unbearable, "'I remind myself that I'm not a person.

"'I'm a piece of software running on the brain "'of a random ape for a few decades.

Have you experienced low points in your life?

Of course we all experience low points in our life and we get appalled by the things, by the ugliness of stuff around us, we might get desperate about our lack of self-regulation.

And sometimes life is hard, and I suspect you don't get to your life, nobody does to get to their life without low points and without moments where they're despairing.

And I thought that let's capture this state and how to deal with that state.

And I found that very often you realize that when you stop taking things personally, when you realize that this notion of a person is a fiction.

Similar as it is in Westworld, where the robots realize that their memories and desires are the stuff that keeps them in the loop.

And they don't have to act on those memories and desires, that our memories and expectations is what make us unhappy.

The day in which we are, for the most part, it's okay, right?

When we are sitting here, right here, right now, we can choose how we feel.

And the thing that affects us is the expectation that something is going to be different from what we want it to be, or the memory that something was different from what you wanted it to be.

And once we basically zoom out from all this, what's left is not a person.

What's left is this state of being conscious, which is a software state.

And software doesn't have an identity, it's a physical law.

And it's a law that acts in all of us and it's embedded in a suitable substrate.

And we didn't pick that substrate, right?

We are mostly randomly instantiated on it.

And there are all these individuals and everybody has to be 1 of them.

And eventually you're stuck on 1 of them and have to deal with that.

So you're like a leaf floating down the river.

You just have to accept that there's a river and you just float.

The thing is that the illusion that you are an agent is a construct.

What part of that is actually under your control.

And I think that our consciousness is largely a control model for our own attention.

So we notice where we are looking and we can influence what we are looking, how we are disambiguating things, how we put things together in our mind.

And the whole system that runs us is this big cybernetic motivational system.

So we're basically like a little monkey sitting on top of an elephant and we can prod this elephant here and there to go this way or that way.

And we might have the illusion that we are the elephant or that we are telling it what to do.

And sometimes we notice that it walks into a completely different direction.

It just is the situation that we find ourselves in.

A lot, but I think that our consciousness cannot create the motive force.

Is the elephant consciousness in this metaphor?

The monkey is the attentional system that is observing things.

There's a large perceptual system combined with a motivational system that is actually providing the interface to everything and our own consciousness, I think, is a tool that directs the attention of that system, which means it singles out features and performs conditional operations for which it needs an index memory.

But this index Memory is what we perceive as our stream of consciousness, but the consciousness is not in charge.

So everything outside of that consciousness is the elephant.

So it's the physics of the universe, but it's also society that's outside of your...

So there is an environment to which the agent is stomping and you are influencing a little part of that agent.

So can you, is the agent a single human being?

I think a way to think about an agent is that it's a controller with a set point generator.

The notion of a controller comes from cybernetics and control theory.

Control system consists out of a system that is regulating some value and the deviation of that value from a set point.

And it has a sensor that measures the system's deviation from that set point and an effector that can be parameterized by the controller.

So the controller tells the effector to do a certain thing.

And the goal is to reduce the distance between the set point and the current value of the system.

And there's an environment which disturbs the regulated system, which brings it away from that set point.

The thermostat is really simple because it doesn't have a model.

The thermostat is only trying to minimize the set point deviation in the next moment.

And if you want to minimize the set point deviation over a longer time span, You need to integrate it, you need to model what is going to happen.

So for instance, when you think about that your set point is to be comfortable in life, maybe you need to make yourself uncomfortable first.

So you need to make a model of what's going to happen when.

And this is task of the controller is to use its sensors to measure the state of the environment and the system that is being regulated and figure out what to do.

And if the task is complex enough, the set points are complicated enough, And if the controller has enough capacity and enough sensor feedback, then the task of the controller is to make a model of the entire universe that it's in, the conditions under which it exists, and of itself.

And this is a very complex agent, and we are in that category.

And an agent is not necessarily a thing in the universe.

It's a class of models that we use to interpret aspects of the universe.

And when we notice the environment around us, a lot of things only make sense at the level that we're entangled with them if we interpret them as control systems that make models of the world and try to minimize their own set points.

And we notice that we are an agent ourself.

We are the agent that is using our own control model to perform actions.

We notice we produce a change in the model and things in the world change.

And this is how we discover the idea that we have a body, that we are situated environment, and that we have a first person perspective.

Still don't understand what's the best way to think of which object has agency with respect to human beings.

Is it the contents of the brain that has agency?

Like what's the actuators that you're referring to?

What is the controller and where does it reside?

Because I keep trying to ground it to space-time, the three-dimensional space and the 1 dimension of time.

It depends on the way in which you're looking at the thing in which you're framing it.

Imagine that you are, say, Angela Merkel, and you are acting on behalf of Germany.

Then you could say that Germany is the agent.

And in the mind of Angela Merkel, she is Germany to some extent, because in the way in which she acts, the destiny of Germany changes.

There are things that she can change that basically affect the behavior of that nation state.

So it's hierarchies of, to go to another 1 of your tweets with, I think you were playfully mocking Jeff Hawkins with saying his brain's all the way down.

It's agents made up of agents made up of agents.

Like if Angela Merkel is Germany, and Germany is made up of a bunch of people, and the people are themselves agents in some kind of context, And then people are made up of cells, each individual.

I suspect that has to be like this in a world where things are self-organizing.

Most of the complexity that we are looking at, everything in life is about self-organization.

So I think up from the level of life, you have agents.

And below life, you rarely have agents because sometimes you have control systems that emerge randomly in nature and try to achieve a set point, but they're not that interesting agents that make models.

And because to make an interesting model of the world, you typically need a system that is Turing complete.

What's the line between life and non-life?

It's personal because you're a life form.

So what do you think in this emerging complexity, at which point does a thing start being living and have agency?

Personally, I think that the simplest answer is that life is cells.

So it's a particular kind of principle that we have discovered to exist in nature.

It's modular stuff that consists out of basically this DNA tape with a redried head on top of it that is able to perform arbitrary computations and state transitions within the cell.

And it's combined with a membrane that insulates the cell from its environment.

And there are chemical reactions inside of the cell that are in disequilibrium.

And the cell is running in such a way that this disequilibrium doesn't disappear.

And the cell goes, if the cell goes into an equilibrium state, it dies.

And it requires some thing like an neck entropy extractor to maintain this disequilibrium.

So it's able to harvest neck entropy from its environment and keep itself running.

Yeah, so there's information and there's a wall to protect, to maintain this equilibrium.

You could say that there are probably other things in the universe that are cell-like and life-like, and you could also call them life, but eventually it's just a willingness to find an agreement of how to use the terms.

I like cells because it's completely coextensional with the way that we use the word even before we knew about cells.

So people were pointing at some stuff and saying this is somehow animate and this is very different from the non-animate stuff and what's the difference between the living and the dead stuff.

And it's mostly whether the cells are working or not.

And also this boundary of life where we say that, for instance, a virus is basically an information packet that is subverting the cell and not life by itself.

That makes sense to me and it's somewhat arbitrary.

You could of course say that systems that permanently maintain a disequilibrium and can self-replicate are always life.

And maybe that's a useful definition too, but this is eventually just how you want to use the word.

Is it so useful for conversation, but is it somehow fundamental to the universe?

Do you think there's a actual line to eventually be drawn between life and non-life, or is it all a kind of continuum?

I don't think it's a continuum, but there's nothing magical that is happening.

Living systems are a certain type of machine.

There are non-living machines, but the question is at which point is a system able to perform arbitrary state transitions to make representations?

And of course, we can also build non-living things that can do this.

But we don't know anything in nature that is not a cell and is not created by cellular life that is able to do that.

Not only do we not know, I don't think we have the tools to see otherwise.

I always worry that we look at the world too narrowly.

Like we have, there could be life of a very different kind right under our noses that we're just not seeing because we're not either limitations of our cognitive capacity or we're just not open-minded enough, either with the tools of science or just the tools of our mind.

And I suspect that many of us ask ourselves since childhood, what are the things that we are missing?

What kind of systems and interconnections exist that are outside of our gaze?

And physics doesn't have much room at the moment for opening up something that would not violate the conservation of information as we know it.

Yeah, but I wonder about time scale and scale, spatial scale, whether we just need to open up our idea of what, like how life presents itself.

It could be operating at a much slower time scale, a much faster time scale.

And it's almost sad to think that there's all this life around us that we're not seeing because we're just not thinking in terms of the right scale, both time and space.

Entities of sufficiently high complexity that are full of surprises.

I don't have a free will, so that just came out of my mouth.

So complexity seems to be a necessary property of life.

And I almost want to say it has ability to do something unexpected.

It seems to me that life is the main source of complexity on earth.

And complexity is basically a bridge head that order builds into chaos by modeling, by processing information in such a way that you can perform reactions that would not be possible for dump systems.

And this means that you can harvest like entropy that dump systems cannot harvest.

And this is what complexity is mostly about.

In some sense, the purpose of life is to create complexity.

Increasing, I mean, there's, there seems to be some kind of universal drive towards increasing pockets of complexity.

That seems to be like a fundamental, I don't know if it's a property of the universe or it's just a consequence of the way the universe works, but there seems to be this small pockets of emergent complexity that builds on top of each other and starts having like greater and greater complexity by having like a hierarchy of complexity.

Little organisms building up a little society that then operates almost as an individual organism itself.

And all of a sudden you have Germany and Merkel.

Everything that goes up has to come down at some point.

So if you see this big exponential curve somewhere, it's usually the beginning of an S-curve, where something eventually reaches saturation.

And the S-curve is the beginning of some kind of bump that goes down again.

And there is just this thing that when you are inside of an evolution of life, you are on top of a puddle of negentropy that is being sucked dry by life.

And during that happening, you see an increase in complexity.

Because life forms are competing with each other to get more and more and finer and finer corner of that entropy extraction.

But that, I feel like that's a gradual, beautiful process like that's almost, you know, follows a process akin to evolution.

And the way it comes down is not the same way it came up The way it comes down is usually harshly and quickly So usually there's some kind of catastrophic event.

But would you classify that as a decrease in complexity, though?

I think that this size of the cities that could be fed has decreased dramatically.

And you could see that the quality of the art decreased and it did so gradually.

And maybe future generations, when they look at the history of the United States in the 21st century, will also talk about the gradual decline, not something that suddenly happens.

Or are we at the downslope of the United States empire?

It's very hard to say from a single human perspective, but it seems to me that we are probably at the peak.

I think that's probably the definition of like optimism and cynicism.

So My nature of optimism is I think we're on the rise.

I think this is just all a matter of perspective.

Nobody knows, but I do think that erring on the side of optimism, like you need a sufficient number, You need a minimum number of optimists in order to make that up thing actually work.

And so I tend to be on the side of the optimists.

I think that we are basically a species of grasshoppers that have turned into locusts.

And when you are in that Locust mode, you see an amazing rise of population numbers and of the local complexity of the interactions between the individuals.

But it's ultimately the question is, is it sustainable?

See, I think we're a bunch of lions and tigers that have become domesticated cats, to use a different metaphor.

And so I'm not exactly sure we're so destructive, we're just softer and nicer and lazier.

I think we have monkeys and not the cats.

And If you look at the monkeys, they are very busy.

The ones that have a lot of sex, those monkeys?

I think that all the monkeys are basically a discontent species that always needs to meddle.

Well, the gorillas seem to have a little bit more of a structure, but it's a different part of the tree.

Okay, you mentioned the elephant and the monkey riding the elephant, and consciousness is the monkey, and there's some prodding that the monkey gets to do, and sometimes the elephant listens.

I heard you got into some contentious, maybe you can correct me, but I heard you got into some contentious free will discussions.

Is this with Sam Harris or something like that?

Clubhouse told me you made a bunch of big debate points about free will.

Well, let me just then ask you, where in terms of the monkey and the elephant, do you think we land in terms of the illusion of free will?

We have to think about what the free will is in the first place.

We are not the thing that is making the decisions.

We are a model of that decision-making process.

And there is a difference between making your own decisions and predicting your own decisions.

And that difference is the first-person perspective.

And what basically makes decision-making under conditions of free will distinct from just automatically doing the best thing is that we often don't know what the best thing is.

We make informed bets using a betting algorithm that we don't yet understand because we haven't reverse engineered our own minds sufficiently.

We don't know the mechanism by which we estimate the rewards and so on.

observe ourselves performing where we see that we weigh facts and factors and the future, and then some kind of possibility, some motive gets raised to an intention.

And that's informed bet that the system is making.

And that making of the informed bet, the representation of that is what we call free will.

And it seems to be paradoxical because we think that the crucial thing is that it's somehow indeterministic.

And yet, if it was indeterministic, it would be random.

And it cannot be random because if it was random, if just dice were being thrown in the universe randomly forces you to do things, it would be meaningless.

So the important part of the decisions is always the deterministic stuff.

But it appears to be indeterministic to you because it's unpredictable.

Because if it was predictable, you wouldn't experience it as a free will decision.

You would experience it as just doing the necessary right thing.

And you see this continuum between the free will and the execution of automatic behavior when you're observing other people.

So for instance, when you are observing your own children, if you don't understand them, you will use this agent model where you have an agent with a set point generator, and the agent is doing the best it can to minimize the difference to the set point.

And it might be confused and sometimes impulsive or whatever, but it's acting on its own free will.

And when you understand what's happens in the mind of the child, you see that it's automatic and you can outmodel the child.

You can build things around the child that will lead the child to making exactly the decision that you are predicting.

And under these circumstances, like when you are a stage musician or somebody who is dealing with people that you sell a car to, And you completely understand the psychology and the impulses and the space of thoughts that this individual can have at that moment.

Under these circumstances, it makes no sense to attribute free will because it's no longer decision-making under uncertainty.

For them, there's uncertainty, but you already know what they're doing.

So is this akin to systems like cellular automata where it's deterministic, but when you squint your eyes a little bit, it starts to look like there's agents making decisions at the higher, sort of when you zoom out and look at the entities that are composed by the individual cells.

Even though there's underlying simple rules that make the system evolve in deterministic ways.

It looks like there's organisms making decisions.

Is that where the illusion of free will emerges?

It's a particular type of model, but this jump in scale is crucial.

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Joscha Bach: Nature of Reality, Dreams, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #212