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Joscha Bach, VP of Research at the AI Foundation, previously doing research at MIT and Harvard. Joscha work explores the workings of the human mind, intelligence, consciousness, life on Earth, and the possibly-simulated fabric of our universe.

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What is dualism, what is idealism, what is materialism, what is functionalism, and what connects with you most?

In terms of, because you just mentioned, there's a reality we don't have access to.

So the particular trajectory that mostly exists in the West is the result of our indoctrination by a cult for 2,000 years.

And for better or worse, It has created or defined many of the modes of interaction that we have that has created this society, but it has also in some sense scarred our rationality.

And the intuition that exists, if you would translate the mythology of the Catholic Church into the modern world, is that the world in which you and me interact is something like a multiplayer role-playing adventure.

And the money and the objects that we have in this world, this is all not real.

Or as Eastern philosophers would say, it's maya.

It's just stuff that appears to be meaningful, and this embedding in this meaning, if you believe in it, is samsara.

It's basically the identification with the needs of the mundane, secular, everyday existence.

And the Catholics also introduced the notion of higher meaning, the sacred.

And this existed before, but eventually the natural shape of God is the platonic form of the civilization that you are part of.

It's basically the superorganism that is formed by the individuals as an intentional agent.

And basically the Catholics used a relatively crude mythology to implement software on the minds of people and get the software synchronized to make them walk in lockstep To basically get this God online and to make it efficient and effective.

And I think God technically is just a self that spans multiple brains as opposed to your and my self, which mostly exists just on 1 brain, right?

And so in some sense you can construct a self functionally as a function that is implemented by brains that exists across brains.

That's 1 of the, if you, Yuval Harari kind of talking about, this is 1 of the nice features of our brains, it seems, that we can all download the same piece of software, like God in this case, and kind of share it.

You give everybody a spec, and the mathematical constraints that are intrinsic to information processing make sure that, given the same spec, you come up with a compatible structure.

Okay, so there's the space of ideas that we all share and we think that's kind of the mind.

But that's separate from, The idea is, from Christianity, from religion, is that there's a separate thing between the mind and- There

is a real world, and this real world is the world in which God exists.

God is the coder of the multiplayer adventure, so to speak, and We are all players in this game.

Yes, but the dualist aspect is because the mental realm exists in a different implementation than the physical realm.

And a lot of people have this intuition that there is this real room in which you and me talk and speak right now, then comes a layer of physics and abstract rules and so on, and then comes another real room where our souls are, and our true form isn't a thing that gives us phenomenal experience.

And this is, of course, a very confused notion that you would get.

And it's basically, it's the result of connecting materialism and idealism in the wrong way.

So, okay, I apologize, but I think it's really helpful if we just try to define terms.

Like, what is dualism, what is idealism, what is materialism for people that don't know?

So the idea of dualism in our cultural tradition is that there are 2 substances, a mental substance and a physical substance, and they interact by different rules.

And the physical world is basically causally closed and is built on a low level causal structure.

So there's basically a bottom level that is causally closed that's entirely mechanical.

And mechanical in the widest sense, so it's computational.

There's basically a physical world in which information flows around, and physics describes the laws of how information flows around in this world.

Would you compare it to like a computer where you have hardware and software?

The computer is a generalization of information flowing around.

Basically, what Turing discovered, that there is a universal principle, you can define this universal machine that is able to perform all the computations.

So all these machines have the same power.

This means that you can always define a translation between them, as long as they have unlimited memory to be able to perform each other's computations.

So would you then say that materialism is, this whole world is just the hardware and idealism is this whole world is just the software?

I think that most idealists don't have a notion of software yet, because software also comes down to information processing, right?

So what you notice is the only thing that is real to you and me is this experiential world in which things matter, in which things have taste, in which things have color, phenomenal content, and so on.

realize that- And you are bringing up consciousness, okay.

And this is distinct from the physical world, in which things have values only in an abstract sense, and you only look at cold patterns moving around.

So how does anything feel like something?

And this connection between the 2 things is very puzzling to a lot of people, and of course, to many philosophers.

So idealism starts out with the notion that mind is primary, materialism, things that matter is primary.

And so for the idealist, the material patterns that we see playing out are part of the dream that the mind is dreaming.

And we exist in a mind on a higher plane of existence, if you want.

And for the materialist, there is only this material thing, and that generates some models, and we are the result of these models.

And in some sense, I don't think that we should understand, if we understand it properly, materialism and idealism is a dichotomy, but as 2 different aspects of the same thing.

So the weird thing is we don't exist in the physical world.

We do exist inside of a story that the brain tells itself.

let me, my information processing, take that in.

We don't exist in the physical world, we exist in the narrative.

Stay Forever Basically, a brain cannot feel anything.

Physical systems are unable to experience anything.

But it would be very useful for the brain or for the organism to know what it would be like to be a person and to feel something.

So the brain creates a simulacrum of such a person that it uses to model the interactions of the person.

It's the best model of what that brain, this organism, thinks it is in relationship to its environment.

It's a story, a multimedia novel, that the brain is continuously writing and updating.

But you also kind of said that, you said that we kind of exist in that story.

So like, there's a, again, these terms are, you kind of said there's a quantum graph.

I mean, what is this whole thing running on then?

Is the story, and is it completely, fundamentally impossible to get access to it?

Because isn't the story supposed to, isn't the brain in something, in existing in some kind of context?

So what we can identify as computer scientists, we can engineer systems and test our theories this way, that may have the necessary insufficient properties to produce the phenomena that we are observing, which is there is a self in a virtual world that is generated in somebody's neocortex that is contained in the skull of this primate here.

And when I point at this, this indexicality is of course wrong.

But I do create something that is likely to give rise to patterns on your retina that allow you to interpret what I'm saying, right?

But we both know that the world that you and me are seeing is not the real physical world.

What we are seeing is a virtual reality generated in your brain to explain the patterns on your retina.

Is it, when you have people like Donald Hoffman that say that you're really far away, the thing we're seeing, you and I now, that interface we have is very far away from anything.

We don't even have anything close to the sense of what the real world is.

Or Is it a very surface piece of architecture?

Imagine you look at the Mandelbrot fractal, right?

This famous thing that Bernard Mandelbrot discovered.

If you see an overall shape in there, right?

But you know, if you truly understand it, you know it's 2 lines of code.

It's basically a series that is being tested for complex numbers in the complex number plane for every point.

And for those where the series is diverging, you paint this black, And where it's converging, you don't.

And you get the intermediate colors by checking how far it diverges.

This gives you this shape of this fractal.

But imagine you live inside of this fractal and you don't have access to where you are in the fractal or you have not discovered the generator function even.

So what you see is, all I can see right now is a spiral and this spiral moves a little bit to the right.

You know that there is actually no spiral in the Meidelberg Fractal.

It only appears like this to an observer that is interpreting things as a two-dimensional space and then defines certain irregularities in there at a certain scale that it currently observes, because if you zoom in, the spiral might disappear and turn out to be something different at a different resolution, right?

So at this level, you have the spiral and then you discover the spiral moves to the right and at some point it disappears.

At this point, your model is no longer valid.

You cannot predict what happens beyond the singularity.

But you can observe again and you will see it hit another spiral and at this point it disappeared.

And if you make 30 layers of these laws, then you have a description of the world that is similar to the 1 that we come up with when we describe the reality around us.

It does not cut to the core of it, it does not explain how it's being generated, how it actually works, but it's relatively good to explain the universe that we are entangled with.

But you don't think the tools of computer science, the tools of physics could get, could step outside, see the whole drawing, and get at the basic mechanism of how the pattern, the spirals are generated.

Imagine you would find yourself embedded into a motherboard fractal and you try to figure out what works and you somehow have a Turing machine with enough memory to think.

And as a result, you come to this idea, it must be some kind of automaton.

And maybe you just enumerate all the possible automata until you get to the 1 that produces your reality.

So you can identify necessary and sufficient conditions.

For instance, we discover that mathematics itself is the domain of all languages.

And then we see that most of the domains of mathematics that we have discovered are in some sense describing the same fractals.

This is what category theory is obsessed about, that you can map these different domains to each other.

And some of these have interesting structure and symmetry breaks.

And so you can discover what region of this global fractal you might be embedded in from first principles.

But the only way you can get there is from first principles.

So basically, your understanding of the universe has to start with automata and then number theory and then spaces and so on.

Yeah, I think like Stephen Wolfram still dreams that he'll be able to arrive at the fundamental rules of the cellular automata or the generalization of which is behind our universe.

You've said on this topic, you said in a recent conversation that quote, some people think that a simulation can't be conscious and only a physical system can, but they got it completely backward.

Consciousness is a simulated property that simulates itself.

Just like you said, the mind is kind of, we'll call it story, narrative.

There's a simulation, so our mind is essentially a simulation.

Usually I try to use the terminology so that the mind is basically the principles that produce the simulation.

It's the software that is implemented by your brain.

And the mind is creating both the universe that we are in and the self, the idea of a person that is on the other side of attention and is embedded in this world.

Why is that important, that idea of a self?

Why is that an important feature in the simulation?

It's basically a result of the purpose that the mind has.

We are side effects of the regulation needs of monkeys.

And what the monkey has to regulate is the relationship of an organism to an outside world that is in large part also consisting of other organisms.

And as a result, it basically has regulation targets that it tries to get to.

These regulation targets start with priors.

They're basically like unconditional reflexes that we are more or less born with, and then we can reverse engineer them to make them more consistent.

And then we get more detailed models about how the world works and how to interact with it.

And so these priors that you commit to are largely target values that our needs should approach, set points.

And this deviation to the set point creates some urge, some tension, and we find ourselves living inside of feedback loops, right?

The consciousness emerges over dimensions of disagreements with the universe.

Things that you care, things are not the way they should be, that you need to regulate.

And so in some sense, the sense itself is the result of all the identifications that you're having.

An identification is a regulation target that you're committing to.

It's a dimension that you care about, that you think is important.

If you let go of these commitments, of these identifications, you get free.

There's nothing that you have to do anymore.

And if you let go of all of them, you're completely free and you can enter Nirvana because you're done.

And actually, this is a good time to pause and say thank you to a friend of mine, Gustav Sordestrom, who introduced me to your work.

He's a brilliant guy, and I think the AI community is actually quite amazing, and Gustav is a good representative of that, you are as well.

So I'm glad, first of all, I'm glad the internet exists, YouTube exists where I can watch your talks and then get to your book and study your writing and think about, you know, that's amazing.

Okay, but you've kind of described instead of this emergent phenomenon of consciousness from the simulation.

So what about the hard problem of consciousness?

Why does it still feel, like I understand you're kind of, the self is an important part of the simulation, but why does the simulation feel like something?

So if you look at a book by say George R.R.

Martin where the characters have plausible psychology.

And they stand on a hill because they want to conquer the city below the hill and they're done in it.

And they look at the color of the sky and they are apprehensive and feel empowered and all these things.

It's because it's written into the story, right?

And it's written into the story because it's an adequate model of the person that predicts what they're going to do next.

So it's basically a story that our brain is writing.

It's not written in words, it's written in perceptual content, basically multimedia content.

And it's a model of what the person would feel if it existed.

And you and me happen to be this virtual person.

So this virtual person gets access to the language center and talks about the sky being blue.

But hold on a second, do I exist in your simulation?

You do exist in an almost similar way as me.

So there are internal states that are less accessible for me that you have, and so on, and my model might not be completely adequate.

There are also things that I might perceive about you that you don't perceive.

But in some sense, both you and me are some puppets, 2 puppets that enact a play in my mind.

And I identify with 1 of them because I can control 1 of the puppet directly.

And with the other 1, I can create things in between.

So for instance, we can go in an interaction that even leads to a coupling to a feedback loop.

So we can sync things together in a certain way or feel things together.

But this coupling is itself not a physical phenomenon, it's entirely a software phenomenon.

It's the result of 2 different implementations interacting with each other.

So are you suggesting, like the way you think about it, is the entirety of existence, the simulation, and we're kind of each mind is a little sub-simulation, that like, why don't you, why doesn't your mind have access to my mind's full state?

For the same reason that my mind doesn't have access to its own full state.

So basically when I know something about myself it's because I made a model.

part of your brain is tasked with modeling what other parts of your brain are doing.

Yes, but there seems to be an incredible consistency about this world in the physical sense, that there's repeatable experiments and so on.

How does that fit into our silly descendant of apes simulation of the world?

And not everything, there's a lot of fundamental physics experiments that are repeatable for a long time, all over the place, and so on.

The laws of physics, how does that fit in?

It seems that the parts of the world that are not deterministic are not long lived.

So if you build a system, any kind of automaton, so if you build simulations of something, you'll notice that the phenomena that endure are those that give rise to stable dynamics.

So basically, if you see anything that is complex in the world, it's the result of usually of some control, of some feedback that keeps it stable around certain attractors.

And the things that are not stable, that don't give rise to certain harmonic patterns and so on, they tend to get weeded out over time.

So if we are in a region of the universe that sustains complexity, which is required to implement minds like ours.

This is going to be a region of the universe that is very tightly controlled and controllable.

So it's going to have lots of interesting symmetries and also symmetry breaks that allow to the creation of structure.

So there's such an interesting idea that our mind is simulation that's constructing the narrative.

My question is, just to try to understand how that fits with the entirety of the universe.

You're saying that there's a region of this universe that allows enough complexity to create creatures like us, but what's the connection between the brain, the mind, and the broader universe?

Is the mind the starting point, the universe is emergent?

Is the universe the starting point, the minds are emergent?

That's at least a much easier explanation because it allows us to make causal models and I don't see any way to construct an inverse causality.

So what happens when you die to your mind simulation?

So basically the thing that implements myself will no longer be present.

Which means if I am not implemented on the minds of other people, the thing that I identify with.

The weird thing is I don't actually have an identity beyond the identity that I construct.

If I was the Dalai Lama, he identifies as a form of government.

So basically the Dalai Lama gets reborn, not because he's confused, but because he is not identifying as a human being.

He's basically a governmental software that is instantiated in every new generation and new.

So his advisors will pick someone who does this in the next generation.

So if you identify with this, you are no longer human and you don't die in the sense that what dies is only the body of the human that you run on.

To kill the Dalai Lama, you would have to kill his tradition.

And if we look at ourselves, we realize that we are to a small part like this, most of us.

So for instance, if you have children, you realize something lives on in them.

Or if you spark an idea in the world, something lives on.

Or if you identify with the society around you.

Yeah, so in a sense you are kind of like a Dalai Lama in the sense that you, Joshua Bach, is just a collection of ideas.

So you have this operating system on which a bunch of ideas live and interact, and then once you die, some of them jump off the ship.

Identity is a software state, it's a construction.

It's basically a representation of different objects on the same world line.

Is it the ideas that come together to form identity?

Or is each individual identity actually a fundamental thing.

It's a representation that you can get agency over if you care, so basically you can choose what you identify with if you want to.

just seems if the mind is not real, that the birth and death is not a crucial part of it.

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We exist inside the story that the brain tells itself (Joscha Bach) | AI Podcast Clips