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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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So do you think suffering is fundamental to happiness along these lines?

No, suffering is the result of caring about things that you cannot change.

And if you are able to change what you care about to those things that you can change, you will not suffer.

But would you then be able to experience happiness?

Yes, but happiness itself is not important.

When you are a child, you think cookies are very important and you want to have all the cookies in the world, you look forward to being an adult because then you have as many cookies as you want, right?

But as an adult, you realize a cookie is a tool.

And once you eat your vegetables anyway, you stop eating cookies for the most part, because otherwise you will get diabetes and will not be around for your kids.

Yes, but then the cookie, the scarcity of a cookie, if scarcity is enforced nevertheless.

So like the pleasure comes from the scarcity.

Yes, but the happiness is a cookie that your brain bakes for itself.

It's your appraisal of the environment that makes you happy.

And if you can change the appraisal of the environment, which you can learn to, then you can create arbitrary states of happiness.

So they discover the room, this basement room in their brain where the cookies are made, and they indulge in stuff themselves.

And after a few months, it gets really old and the big crisis of meaning comes.

Because they thought before that their unhappiness was the result of not being happy enough.

They can release the neurotransmitters at will if they train.

And then the crisis of meaning pops up a deeper layer.

How can I make a sustainable civilization that is meaningful to me?

And this was the problem that you couldn't solve in the first place.

But at the end of all this, let me then ask that same question.

What could the possible answer be of the meaning of life?

I think that if you look at the meaning of life, You look at what the cell is.

It's this self-organizing thing that can participate in evolution.

In order to make it work, it's a molecular machine.

It needs a self-replicator, an entropy extractor, and a Turing machine.

If any of these parts is missing, you don't have a cell, and it is not living, right?

And life is basically the emergent complexity over that principle.

Once you have this intelligent super molecule, the cell, there is very little that you cannot make it do.

It's probably the optimal computronium, especially in terms of resilience.

It's very hard to sterilize a planet once it's infected with life.

So it's active function of these 3 components of the supercell of cell is present in the cell, is present in us, and it's just.

It's a certain layer of complexity in the organization of cells.

So in a way, it's tempting to think of the cell as a von Neumann probe.

If you want to build intelligence on other planets, the best way to do this is to infect them with cells.

And wait for long enough, and there's a reasonable chance the stuff is going to evolve into an information processing principle that is general enough to become sentient.

With that idea is very akin to sort of the same dream and beautiful ideas that are expressed in cellular automata in their most simple mathematical form.

you just inject the system with some basic mechanisms of replication and so on, basic rules, amazing things would emerge.

And The cell is able to do something that James Tardy calls existential design.

He points out that in technical design, we go from the outside in.

We work in a highly controlled environment in which everything is deterministic, like our computers, our labs, or our engineering workshops.

And then we use this determinism to implement a particular kind of function that we dream up and that seamlessly interfaces with all the other deterministic functions that we already have in our world.

And biological systems designed from the inside out.

A seed will become a seedling by taking some of the relatively unorganized matter around it and turn it into its own structure and thereby subdue the environment.

And cells can cooperate if they can rely on other cells having a similar organization that is already compatible.

But unless that's there, the cell needs to divide to create that structure by itself.

So it's a self-organizing principle that works on a somewhat chaotic environment.

And the purpose of life in the sense is to produce complexity.

And the complexity allows you to harvest neg-entropy gradients that you couldn't harvest without the complexity.

And in this sense, intelligence and life are very strongly connected, because the purpose of intelligence is to allow control under conditions of complexity.

So basically you shift the boundary between the ordered systems into the realm of chaos.

You build bridge heads into chaos with complexity.

This is not necessarily a deeper meaning.

I think the meaning that we have priors for, that we are evolved for, outside of the priors there is no meaning.

Meaning only exists if a mind projects it,

I think that what feels most meaningful to me is to try to build and maintain a sustainable civilization.

And taking a slight step outside of that, we talked about a man with a beard and God, but something, some mechanism, perhaps must have planted the seed, the initial seed of the cell.

So if there was no spontaneous abiogenesis, in the sense that the first cell formed by some happy random accidents where the molecules just happen to be in the right constellation to each other.

But there could also be the mechanism that allows for the random, I mean, there's like turtles all the way down, There seems to be, there has to be a head turtle at the bottom.

Imagine, is it possible that a gas giant could become intelligent?

So imagine you have vortices that spontaneously emerge on the gas giants, like big storm systems that endure for thousands of years.

And some of these storm systems produce electromagnetic fields because some of the clouds are ferromagnetic or something.

And as a result, they can change how certain clouds react rather than other clouds and thereby produce some self-stabilizing patterns that eventually lead to regulation feedback loops, nested feedback loops, and control.

So imagine you have such a thing that basically has emergent, self-sustaining, self-organizing complexity.

And at some point this wakes up and realizes, I'm basically LEM Solaris.

I am a thinking planet, but I will not replicate because I cannot recreate the conditions of my own existence somewhere else.

I'm just basically an intelligence that has spontaneously formed because it could.

And now it builds a von Neumann probe, and the best von Neumann probe for such a thing might be the cell.

So maybe it, because it's very, very clever and very enduring, create cells and sense them out and 1 of them has infected our planet.

And I'm not suggesting that this is the case, but it would be compatible with the Prince Bermion hypothesis and with my intuition that albiogenesis is very unlikely.

It's possible, but you probably need to roll the cosmic dice very often, maybe more often than there are planetary surfaces, I don't know.

So God is just a large enough, a system that's large enough that allows randomness.

Now, I don't think that God has anything to do with creation.

I think it's a mistranslation of the Talmud into the Catholic mythology.

I think that Genesis is actually the childhood memories of a God.

It's basically a mind that is remembering how it came into being.

And we typically interpret Genesis as the creation of a physical universe by a supernatural being.

And I think when you read it, there is light and darkness that is being created, and then you discover sky and ground, create them.

You construct the plants and the animals, and you give everything their names and so on.

It's a sequence of steps that every mind has to go through when it makes sense of the world.

And when you have children, you can see how initially they distinguish light and darkness, and then they make out directions in it, and they discover sky and ground, and they discover the plants and the animals, and they give everything their name.

And it's a creative process that happens in every mind, because it's not given, right?

Your mind has to invent these structures to make sense of the patterns on your retina.

Also, if there was some big nerd who set up a server and runs this world on it, this would not create a special relationship between us and the nerd.

This nerd would not have the magical power to give meaning to our existence, right?

So this equation of a creator-god with the god of meaning is a slate of hand.

The other 1 that is done in Catholicism is the equation of the first mover, the prime mover of Aristotle, which is basically the automaton that runs the universe.

Aristotle says, if things are moving and things seem to be moving here, something must move them, right?

If something moves them, something must move the thing that is moving it.

This idea to say that this prime mover is a supernatural being is complete nonsense, right?

So we have to explain the enormity that this automaton exists at all.

But again, we don't have any possibility to infer anything about its properties except that it's able to produce change in information, right?

So there needs to be some kind of computational principle.

But to say this automaton is identical again with the creator of the first cause or with the thing that gives meaning to our life is confusion.

I think that what we perceive is the higher being that we are part of.

And the higher being that we are part of is the civilization.

It's the thing in which we have a similar relationship as the cell has to our body.

And we have this prior because we have evolved to organize in these structures.

So basically, the Christian God in its natural form, without the mythology, if you undress it, is basically the platonic form of a civilization.

It's this ideal that you try to approximate when you interact with others, not based on your incentives, but on what you think is right.

And we're left with 1 of my favorite lines, and there's many, which is, "'Happiness is a cookie that the brain bakes itself.

It's been a huge honor and a pleasure to talk to you.

I'm sure our paths will cross many times again.


Speaker 0: So do you think suffering is fundamental to happiness along these lines?

Speaker 1: No, suffering is the result of caring about things that you cannot change. And if you are able to change what you care about to those things that you can change, you will not suffer.

Speaker 0: But would you then be able to experience happiness?

Speaker 1: Yes, but happiness itself is not important. Happiness is like a cookie. When you are a child, you think cookies are very important and you want to have all the cookies in the world, you look forward to being an adult because then you have as many cookies as you want, right? But as an adult, you realize a cookie is a tool. It's a tool to make you eat vegetables.

And once you eat your vegetables anyway, you stop eating cookies for the most part, because otherwise you will get diabetes and will not be around for your kids.

Speaker 0: Yes, but then the cookie, the scarcity of a cookie, if scarcity is enforced nevertheless. So like the pleasure comes from the scarcity.

Speaker 1: Yes, but the happiness is a cookie that your brain bakes for itself. It's not made by the environment. The environment cannot make you happy. It's your appraisal of the environment that makes you happy. And if you can change the appraisal of the environment, which you can learn to, then you can create arbitrary states of happiness.

And some meditators fall into this trap. So they discover the room, this basement room in their brain where the cookies are made, and they indulge in stuff themselves. And after a few months, it gets really old and the big crisis of meaning comes. Because they thought before that their unhappiness was the result of not being happy enough. So they fixed this, right?

They can release the neurotransmitters at will if they train. And then the crisis of meaning pops up a deeper layer. And the question is, why do I live? How can I make a sustainable civilization that is meaningful to me? How can I insert myself into this?

And this was the problem that you couldn't solve in the first place.

Speaker 0: But at the end of all this, let me then ask that same question. What is the answer to that? What could the possible answer be of the meaning of life? What could an answer be? What is it to you?

Speaker 1: I think that if you look at the meaning of life, You look at what the cell is. Life is the cell. LR Yes, or this principle, the cell. It's this self-organizing thing that can participate in evolution. In order to make it work, it's a molecular machine.

It needs a self-replicator, an entropy extractor, and a Turing machine. If any of these parts is missing, you don't have a cell, and it is not living, right? And life is basically the emergent complexity over that principle. Once you have this intelligent super molecule, the cell, there is very little that you cannot make it do. It's probably the optimal computronium, especially in terms of resilience.

It's very hard to sterilize a planet once it's infected with life.

Speaker 0: So it's active function of these 3 components of the supercell of cell is present in the cell, is present in us, and it's just.

Speaker 1: We are just an expression of the cell. It's a certain layer of complexity in the organization of cells. So in a way, it's tempting to think of the cell as a von Neumann probe. If you want to build intelligence on other planets, the best way to do this is to infect them with cells. And wait for long enough, and there's a reasonable chance the stuff is going to evolve into an information processing principle that is general enough to become sentient.

Speaker 0: With that idea is very akin to sort of the same dream and beautiful ideas that are expressed in cellular automata in their most simple mathematical form.

Speaker 1: If

Speaker 0: you just inject the system with some basic mechanisms of replication and so on, basic rules, amazing things would emerge.

Speaker 1: And The cell is able to do something that James Tardy calls existential design. He points out that in technical design, we go from the outside in. We work in a highly controlled environment in which everything is deterministic, like our computers, our labs, or our engineering workshops. And then we use this determinism to implement a particular kind of function that we dream up and that seamlessly interfaces with all the other deterministic functions that we already have in our world. So it's basically from the outside in.

And biological systems designed from the inside out. A seed will become a seedling by taking some of the relatively unorganized matter around it and turn it into its own structure and thereby subdue the environment. And cells can cooperate if they can rely on other cells having a similar organization that is already compatible. But unless that's there, the cell needs to divide to create that structure by itself. So it's a self-organizing principle that works on a somewhat chaotic environment.

And the purpose of life in the sense is to produce complexity. And the complexity allows you to harvest neg-entropy gradients that you couldn't harvest without the complexity. And in this sense, intelligence and life are very strongly connected, because the purpose of intelligence is to allow control under conditions of complexity. So basically you shift the boundary between the ordered systems into the realm of chaos. You build bridge heads into chaos with complexity.

And this is what we are doing. This is not necessarily a deeper meaning. I think the meaning that we have priors for, that we are evolved for, outside of the priors there is no meaning. Meaning only exists if a mind projects it,

Speaker 0: right?

Speaker 1: That is probably civilization. I think that what feels most meaningful to me is to try to build and maintain a sustainable civilization.

Speaker 0: And taking a slight step outside of that, we talked about a man with a beard and God, but something, some mechanism, perhaps must have planted the seed, the initial seed of the cell. Do you think there is a God? What is a God? And what would that look like?

Speaker 1: So if there was no spontaneous abiogenesis, in the sense that the first cell formed by some happy random accidents where the molecules just happen to be in the right constellation to each other.

Speaker 0: But there could also be the mechanism that allows for the random, I mean, there's like turtles all the way down, There seems to be, there has to be a head turtle at the bottom.

Speaker 1: Let's consider something really wild. Imagine, is it possible that a gas giant could become intelligent? What would that involve? So imagine you have vortices that spontaneously emerge on the gas giants, like big storm systems that endure for thousands of years. And some of these storm systems produce electromagnetic fields because some of the clouds are ferromagnetic or something.

And as a result, they can change how certain clouds react rather than other clouds and thereby produce some self-stabilizing patterns that eventually lead to regulation feedback loops, nested feedback loops, and control. So imagine you have such a thing that basically has emergent, self-sustaining, self-organizing complexity. And at some point this wakes up and realizes, I'm basically LEM Solaris. I am a thinking planet, but I will not replicate because I cannot recreate the conditions of my own existence somewhere else. I'm just basically an intelligence that has spontaneously formed because it could.

And now it builds a von Neumann probe, and the best von Neumann probe for such a thing might be the cell. So maybe it, because it's very, very clever and very enduring, create cells and sense them out and 1 of them has infected our planet. And I'm not suggesting that this is the case, but it would be compatible with the Prince Bermion hypothesis and with my intuition that albiogenesis is very unlikely. It's possible, but you probably need to roll the cosmic dice very often, maybe more often than there are planetary surfaces, I don't know.

Speaker 0: So God is just a large enough, a system that's large enough that allows randomness.

Speaker 1: Now, I don't think that God has anything to do with creation. I think it's a mistranslation of the Talmud into the Catholic mythology. I think that Genesis is actually the childhood memories of a God. So,

Speaker 0: when… Oh, sorry, Genesis is the…

Speaker 1: The childhood memories of a God. It's basically a mind that is remembering how it came into being. And we typically interpret Genesis as the creation of a physical universe by a supernatural being. And I think when you read it, there is light and darkness that is being created, and then you discover sky and ground, create them. You construct the plants and the animals, and you give everything their names and so on.

That's basically cognitive development. It's a sequence of steps that every mind has to go through when it makes sense of the world. And when you have children, you can see how initially they distinguish light and darkness, and then they make out directions in it, and they discover sky and ground, and they discover the plants and the animals, and they give everything their name. And it's a creative process that happens in every mind, because it's not given, right? Your mind has to invent these structures to make sense of the patterns on your retina.

Also, if there was some big nerd who set up a server and runs this world on it, this would not create a special relationship between us and the nerd. This nerd would not have the magical power to give meaning to our existence, right? So this equation of a creator-god with the god of meaning is a slate of hand. You shouldn't do it. The other 1 that is done in Catholicism is the equation of the first mover, the prime mover of Aristotle, which is basically the automaton that runs the universe.

Aristotle says, if things are moving and things seem to be moving here, something must move them, right? If something moves them, something must move the thing that is moving it. So there must be a prime mover. This idea to say that this prime mover is a supernatural being is complete nonsense, right? It's an automaton in the simplest case.

So we have to explain the enormity that this automaton exists at all. But again, we don't have any possibility to infer anything about its properties except that it's able to produce change in information, right? So there needs to be some kind of computational principle. This is all there is. But to say this automaton is identical again with the creator of the first cause or with the thing that gives meaning to our life is confusion.

I think that what we perceive is the higher being that we are part of. And the higher being that we are part of is the civilization. It's the thing in which we have a similar relationship as the cell has to our body. And we have this prior because we have evolved to organize in these structures. So basically, the Christian God in its natural form, without the mythology, if you undress it, is basically the platonic form of a civilization.

Speaker 0: Is the ideal, is the- Yes,

Speaker 1: It's this ideal that you try to approximate when you interact with others, not based on your incentives, but on what you think is right.

Speaker 0: Wow, we covered a lot of ground. And we're left with 1 of my favorite lines, and there's many, which is, "'Happiness is a cookie that the brain bakes itself. It's been a huge honor and a pleasure to talk to you. I'm sure our paths will cross many times again. Joshua, Thank

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Happiness is a cookie that your brain bakes for itself (Joscha Bach) | AI Podcast Clips