Transcript

Brian Keating:
Everything you experience right now, the sound of my voice, the color of your room, the feeling of being you, is not the world. It’s a simulation your brain is running. And the man who can prove it has just entered the conversation.

Joscha Bach:
What actually makes a cell a cell is not the set of molecules, but it’s the software that is running on them. So the actual invariance of life is a particular kind of software agent that is running on them. V. You and me, we are patterns within this message passing. So you exist as a simulation of what would be like if you existed. Sam Harris thinks that the claim of God is claim about a physical being. God is a psychological phenomenon. This does not mean that God is unreal.

Joscha Bach:
God is not more or less real than you are.

Brian Keating:
Josha bach has spent 20 years arguing that consciousness is not a physics problem, it’s a software problem. And by the end of this conversation, you’ll understand why Roger Penrose is wrong.

Brian Keating:
I believe you said you are not the world, the world is in you. And I’m just kind of wondering where that comes from. That’s. That sounds a little bit like past guest Deepak Chopra, but. But I’m not, I’m sure it’s not meant in that same way. So I’m holding his microphone right now. You know, if I drop it.

Joscha Bach:
What.

Brian Keating:
What just happened? Walk me through, walk my listeners. What just happened? From the brain to reality itself. What. What is going on? Where am I in this process?

Joscha Bach:
First of all, I think in our culture we typically have this division between the inside our psychology, our thoughts, our reflections, our emotions, and the outside world which we take to be this stuff in space environment that is three dimensional and has colors and sounds and mechanisms that we absorb all around us. But when we actually look at physics, we realize that physics consists of many different theories that use different mathematical formalisms that we have not really managed to connect yet, but that we hope to connect in the future. For instance, we have this Newtonian reality that is playing out at the scope at which you can hold and see the microphone as a geometric shape. And then when you drop it, you hear the sound which you understand at some level is not an event that is moving from the microphone to your ear, but it’s actually a statistical pattern that is observing some regularity, but is air molecules bouncing at each other until they reach eardrum and then get translated into the cochlea which does some real time fast Fourier transformation and then senses with the cilia along this spiral organ, how much energy is dispersed in different frequency domains. And then this is being translated into stimulations, little electric or chemical impulses that travel along nerves that are connected to these little hairs up to your auditory cortex in the brain. And that is an end to end trained model that is trying to find regularity in the patterns. The neurons themselves can only fire at something like 20 hertz, comfortably relatively low frequencies. And the sound itself plays out at much higher frequencies.

Joscha Bach:
You can hear sound starting at something like 50 hertz, which means you have like 50 clicks per second, emerge into a single pitch. And on the high end, when we are newborns, we can hear something like 20,000 hertz. And this drops. And our adult age, we go down to a few thousand hertz, to few thousand vibrations per second that we can discern. But it’s not that our nervous system is able to discern frequencies like this because the neurons again are too slow. And so instead we need this mechanism of the cochlea that our organism is providing to break it down into something that is something as slow as our nervous system can process. And the nervous system is then identifying regularities in the pitch at different frequency areas, and then translates this into I just heard the microphone is falling down, which is correlated over patterns that you saw on your retina. From the perspective of the nervous system, what you see is a bunch of blips that come in.

Joscha Bach:
And the nervous system has to find regularities, order in all these blips. The meaning of this information, the information is the discernible differences, the differences between a blip and not a blip in the signal that comes in. And then finds out how this correlates with other blips that might happen at the same time or at different times in different nerves. And the more it’s correlated, the more this is happening at the same time with the same signal, the more it relates to the same phenomenon. If you are newborn and you feel pricks coming in from your skin, it’s not like the nerves are coming into your brain are color coded or something. They just go up there and the brain is trying to sort them and it finds out that these two nerves always give the same signal, which means they probably end up at the same point in the world. Maybe these are two different wires to the term terminal in your skin or on your cochlea or your retina. And when they gave a signal that is similar, that is almost always the same, but not quite the same.

Joscha Bach:
Maybe these are nerves that are just adjacent on your skin, so they are mostly touch at the same time, but not always. And this means that these co occurrence statistics allow you to make a map of your body surface, of your retinal surface, of your auditory organs and so on. And then once you have found an exhaustive map at this level, you look at the next layer and this next layer looks at how are these patterns related. And then you might find out that there is actually this thing moving over your skin, right? So you see some kind of blob moves across these things that you established as being related in space to each other that are adjacent. This can happen on the retina or on your skin. Again, these are different regimes. The statistics of the data that come in from your retina, from your eyes are different from the one that come in from your skin or from your cochlea. But they are organized and interpretable according the same statistical principles.

Joscha Bach:
Eventually you make deeper and deeper models, and these deeper models are merging at some point. The point where they merge is what we experience as the model of reality. It’s this model of now that we have. And this is a three dimensional model of where we see stuff coming through space that is colored and that has shape, that is moving in a particular way and is correlated with the sound and so on. So this is a kind of simulation model that your brain is producing, similar to a game engine in a computer, where you produce this model of your egg shaped microphone that is being dropped according to the same dynamics that you have learned. And it is correlated with the sound that you’re hearing. And these regularities are so stable that you can predict them and use them to make sense of reality. So as soon as you start to think about dropping the microphone, you can already predict what’s going to likely happen and when this is actually happening.

Joscha Bach:
That gives you confirmation that actually my intention of dropping the microphone has turned into a sequence of events that is very much like I predicted it. And so my model of reality is correct. It is the reality that’s currently the case. But what we can already see is that this notion of the outside world here is not referring to the physical world out there. This is not the world of quantum mechanics, relativistic physics or Newtonian mechanics. It’s a game engine that your brain is creating. And so there’s difference between the world of ideas where you reflect on this and the world of percepts. The world of objects that can fall down and make sounds are both domains in your mind.

Joscha Bach:
And so the world is actually a region in your own mind that your mind creates. This doesn’t mean that there is nothing outside of your Mind, right? Something needs to create your mind and maintain it to make it happen. But the world that you experience is not the one that creates your mind. This is a model of reality that exists inside of your mind.

Brian Keating:
That was exceptional because most of your peers that I talked to are sort of unwilling to answer a question in physical terms, as you just did, which is basically to break what they call qualia, or qualia, depending on your pronunciation, into honest to goodness, sensor voltages. Bit level distinction. And I wonder why it is. Why are people so reluctant? You know, Thomas Nagel, you know, what is it like to be a bat? And he basically says, we can’t know. But if you can instrumentalize, if you can break down into sensors, as Galileo used to say, you know, we should measure what we can measure and make measurable what we can. Can you explain why are these such wimps? And I’m not going to name names because I want them to come back on, but most of them won’t really even define consciousness. And that’s like me saying, I don’t know what a planet is. I mean, we can debate Pluto’s a planet, but it’s like pornography.

Brian Keating:
I know it when I see it. So why are your contemporaries, your peers, why are they so unwilling to do what you just did?

Joscha Bach:
Probably many reasons, and different people will have different reasons. But part of the way in which science works as an institution is that individuals are not expected to have a systemic understanding of the world by themselves. Instead, the world is understood collectively. Not only not expected to be able to understand the entire body of knowledge, but trying to do so is seen as hubristic. You’re expecting too much of yourself. You are assuming too much, you are trying to pretend too much. If you try to make sense of all the different domains of knowledge. And so instead of you grasp the world by reference, it’s a global discourse in which you are a very big ant in a giant hive.

Joscha Bach:
And if you talk to the world outside of your local horizon, of your little ant horizon that you can actually touch and comprehend and make sense of, you have to point at thousands or tens of thousands or millions of other ants who are holding down all the other areas of knowledge, of course, you have to rely on them actually making sense. And this leads sometimes to this weird situation that people are pointing at each other and hope that this other authority understands the part that they themselves don’t understand. Sometimes all the ends don’t realize that there are big, unexplored areas where there are actually basically no ends or no ends. Anymore. And this leads to of course, there being gaps in our knowledge, especially in terms of first principles thinking. Or some of the ends are pointing at other ends that are in areas that are completely broken and defective and they still hope that these other ants have high standards and basically know what they’re doing. And there’s also this idea that this is the only way in which this can be done and we have to rely on the other ends doing the right thing, applying the right methods. And science is not actually the attempt to understand reality from first principles, but it’s the identification of the correct methods and then just applying these methods.

Joscha Bach:
And the individual end is exchangeable and doesn’t really matter. And what the individual end believes about reality also doesn’t really matter. So asking one of the ends, how does reality work if the ant is actually attuned to this way of modeling reality? Says, this is not my job. My job is not to make sense of the big picture. And the big picture is way too complicated to make sense of for an end. And asking me to do so is just pointing out that you don’t understand how the game has to be played. This is a pre scientific notion that the individual scientist is actually able to make sense of reality. There is something like pop sci that you are breaking science down into digestible bits for the public.

Joscha Bach:
But pop sci is not an adequate representation of what the experts are thinking, because what the experts are thinking is so advanced that it’s actually unintelligible.

Brian Keating:
So when I talked to David Deutsch last summer, he basically conveyed to me that explanations, not predictions, underlie the most basic currency of the scientific economy, so to speak. But what you’re saying sort of maybe different than what he’s saying. Where do you view this constructor where the goal of whatever consciousness can produce is to explain versus predict. It sounds like when you described your modeling model is another fancy way of saying simulation or maybe the other way around. Right. So where do you differ with David and where might you agree?

Joscha Bach:
First of all, David is himself an outlier, but he is not your typical scientist. I’d also like to point out that his main recent contribution, constructor theory, has not gotten much traction outside of his own lab. That’s true. Very few people actually understand it. And despite his book having some degree of influence in the sense of people say, yeah, I read it and it’s mind blowing, it changed the way in which I perceive reality. It has not actually created a discipline or even produced a new discipline. And myself, I also fail to understand what Constructor theory is changing about the way in which we make sense of computation. Personally, I suspect that it’s more in a more elegant way to think of computation from first principles.

Joscha Bach:
But it’s not radical enough to make a switch similar to how people are not switching from the QWERTY keyboard to the Duora keyboard, even though there are more efficient ways to build a typewriter today than there were in the past. But people, once they learn to use the old typewriting layout, just don’t see the reason to make the switch. And so maybe this is one of the reasons. Another one is for some paradigm to catch on. It needs to create jobs. Maybe David Deutsch doesn’t have enough peers to create peer reviewed conferences that would make Deutsche in computationalism or constructor Revism a feasible discipline that is going to create tenured positions for future scientists. Maybe it would need to happen to give him traction. But he’s definitely in the camp of the minority of people who try to find explanations.

Joscha Bach:
And I would say that this is atypical. It’s like the PhD is the great Filter, that once you are through it, you realize that your job is not to explain reality and to have deep thoughts about things, but your job is to apply methods and work on the topics that are currently fashionable and fundable and so on. David Deutsch is living this dream. And I think that because of the credentials that he acquired in his tenure in science, he’s gotten the freedom to do so, even though very few people who actually follow in his footsteps, also of the footsteps of the thoughts that he developed. And maybe this is an issue, it shows some problem with science today. Maybe it also shows that there is a discrepancy between how the institutions of science have diverged from this more modernist way of thinking that David Deutsch has.

Brian Keating:
Here’s where Yosha breaks from almost every AI researcher you’ve ever heard. He doesn’t define intelligence by output, he defines it by the ability to make models. Now listen carefully.

Brian Keating:
I believe what you described. The Dvorak vs. Qwerty keyboard. That’s a symptom of phenomenon technology called lock in, where sometimes the first method to market becomes so overwhelmingly successful that it crowds out the oxygen needed to incubate new ideas that are superior. So as you said, DWARAK is superior. QWERTY was invented to slow down the typing speed so that mechanical hammers, which nobody knows about, under age 50 now. I used the keyboard with the mechanical hammers a long time ago. A typewriter and the hammers would Stick if you used letters too frequently adjacent to one another.

Brian Keating:
So they purposely slow down the user’s input. Putting less frequently used letters next to each other, like Q and W. They never occur together in the English language. Right. So my point that I’ve tried to often make is I believe that’s a proof that we’ll never get to AGI with current models, including LLMs coupled to GPUs simply because they’re so successful. There’s no stopping. There’s tens of trillions of dollars being deployed to them in many different parts of the world, including where you are now. But they’re so successful that they basically gonna crowd out the true definition of AGI, which I claim would be actually constructing and predicting.

Brian Keating:
I agree with you. I think prediction of new phenomena based on inductive reasoning is the most powerful form of the scientific method. To the extent that the scientific method exists. Exist. What do you make of the success of this chat Nvidia or Nvidia GPT that it’s so successful? Do you think that there’s an actual pathway for the same things that were designed to render video games that you and I played as kids, Doom and Duke Nukem? And I forget what other video games you used to play, but I used to play these 3D games and I love them. And that’s why Nvidia is a $4 or $5 trillion company. But that’s not necessarily the substrate on which physics is built. So walk me through your thoughts.

Brian Keating:
Do you think that we’re going to get to AGI? And first of all, define your definition of AGI. I gave you mine. New physical phenomena. Predictions of new physical phenomena based on a corpus of knowledge that we have now that’s truly useful. It’s not going to depend on knowing the plot of the next Fast and the Furious movie. It’s going to be something completely different. So walk me through your definition of AGI and whether or not you think LLMs plus GPTs are an obstacle or a benefit.

Joscha Bach:
I see intelligence as the ability to make models, and intelligence would be the ability to create new models. It’s basically when you are behaving out of distribution, when you’re doing things that have never been done before, confronted with a problem space and there is a certain set of problems that is solvable, and we can probably construct some theory about what is solvable. This means that given the data that you have, you are confronted with some kind of solution space. Then you have a way to test those solutions and to identify solutions before you test them. And so you need to sort the solution space in such a way that the solutions that you test are relatively early on, and you need to find an optimal method for doing that or a method that is good enough. And so you could say that artificial general intelligence is the ability to construct a model. Then such a model can be constructed with the resources that you’ve got. This is only approximate, right? It’s within some delta, because maybe you need to do some kind of heuristic search, maybe it’s not always working and you don’t require the intelligence, some kind of optimal process.

Joscha Bach:
It should be in the ballpark of this. It should be something that where you basically you put this squirrel in front of a problem to get to the bird feeder. And if the squirrel, given the information that it observes and the brain capacity that it has at its disposal, its working memory capacity, its ability to muster attention and hold working memory state stable and so on, how many pointers can it hold in its brain? And if it’s able to construct the solution and should be able to construct the solution and actually is, you could say that this squirrel is, in this sense, generally intelligent. You could also say that it’s a slightly different definition of general intelligence where you require certain benchmark problems to be solved. And personally, I think the most interesting benchmark problem to be solved in this space is to understand how you actually work. So this could be a sign of the maturity of a mind that is slightly outside of the regime of unaugmented humans. Because we are without tools, unable to even build simulations in our own mind of how perception works and so on. We need to run computer simulations of a lot of those things before we understand why the visual cortex looks the way it does, right? So even if we have very sophisticated measurement instruments to look into our brains and microscope them and try to analyze the connectome and use fmris to see how activation is spreading through the brain and so on.

Joscha Bach:
To make sense of this, ultimately, we need to build theories that we can only test with computers. But imagine that you were in mind that is much more detailed, that can hold many more details stable, that can hold more balls in the air. If you are some AI, that of course there is nothing that stops the AI to understand how the AI actually works and to understand its own functioning from first principles. And this could be a very interesting milestone for general intelligence. Are you actually smart enough to know how something like you is possible and how it works? And so for me, Turing’s test is not so much a test for a machine What Turing ultimately is Interested in his 1950 paper is the question, if Turing himself can understand what intelligence is, or by extension, humanity. Humanity can. We basically get ourselves to the point, using the most sophisticated tools that we can build, to understand what we are as intelligent agents, as intelligent beings. So this would be an interesting benchmark problem.

Joscha Bach:
For me, this benchmark which you have chosen might be closer to your heart, basically compressing the Standard model. But for me, compressing the Standard model just seems to be like another puzzle. Maybe this is not much harder than playing go. We just need to write this down in the right way, and then we iterate on it for long enough with some kind of Monte Carlo simulation until we condense the theory space to the simplest automaton that reproduces the Standard model.

Brian Keating:
So, staying with Go, it’s clear, obviously no human can be even a basic, you know, model of GO playing algorithms, right? But can an algorithm? Can an AGI is a possible definition, something that could create a game like go. In other words, there’s no telling that it can and will never beat the best computers in chess or Go or many other games or, you know, tic tac toe is my last stand, right? I mean, I can still beat most computers in tic tac toe, or at least tie half the time. But in reality, it’s the creation of the game that’s the novelty, that’s the surprise. That’s the thing that takes you out, as you defined it, serendipitously, from what you expected, providing you with surprise, delight and awe. Do you think a computer and AGI is capable of designing some new game? Forget about the Standard Model for saying can it design a game or can it do something of use, maybe just to other AIs, but maybe to humans as well.

Joscha Bach:
I suspect that for types of minds like ours to work, you need to have some kind of cybernetic regulation that we subjectively experience as the fulfillment of desires or their frustration. So, for instance, boredom is a pain signal that we get when we revisit ground that we have trodden too often. So our mind is trying not to waste its cycles by revisiting those areas. And as a result, we learn much faster because we actively avoid data that we feel we have already extracted all the useful information from. Unlike our current models that need more and more data, until they encounter new information that actually update the model in a significant way and put way too much data into them, we have a mechanism that actively lets us avoid boring training data. D training data that is uneconomical to try to extract new knowledge from. And the opposite is also true. We basically are honing in on stuff that allows us to discover interesting new structure.

Joscha Bach:
And we are attracted to this, and we get positive reward out of discovering this new structure. Even if this new structure is objectively useless, right. Subjectively, you might still think it’s good. So I’ve seen a lot of good minds being destroyed by chess because they basically play this game and they learn all the structure that is inherent in chess, but it is not transferring to anything useful in the world. And so instead of using these brain cycles to actually solve physics or AGI or cooking or dancing, relationship issues, right, they waste it on this mechanical, stupid game that gives them cred in a very small community.

Brian Keating:
Much like with physics, as you discussed before, we have H indices, we have tenure, we have grants, we have all the hunger games that you could possibly imagine. But it’s not novel, and it does lead to boredom, and that leads to faculty club arguments that rival, you know, nuclear superpowers going head to head.

Joscha Bach:
I really love this thing about physics that you go to a foundational physics conference and you have all these wonderful weirdos that have all built their model toy trains and show them to each other, and none of them actually completely work, but they’re super exciting because they are so intricate. And you also see this thing that it’s not like smart people don’t make mistakes, but the smarter they are, the less trivial mistakes become, the more complicated they are, the more impossible they become to debug for normal models. So there’s no end to this, because understanding physics seems to be one of those problems that is just outside, in a very tantalizing way, of the capacity of the unaugmented human brain.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, I always joke that physicists have the worst theory of mind because we think we’re always right and we think our colleagues are always wrong, and that just can’t be true. Right? I mean, we’re wrong as much as our colleagues are wrong, and there’s really

Joscha Bach:
no end to them philosophers one day.

Brian Keating:
But you mentioned the squirrel. Imagine, you know, my neuroscientist friend Nikolai Kukushkin, or somebody hands you a perfect connectome, I mean, flawless connectome of the squirrel. Every synapse, every weight function, everything’s frozen in silicon. There it is. You can run it forward in time. You can back propagate. Is the mouse in there?

Joscha Bach:
First of all, I suspect that it wouldn’t work. I suspect that the current models of neuroscience do not accumulate. I don’t think that if you were able to fully capture the connectome of an organism and try to run it in a computer simulation, it’s not going to reproduce anything that looks like the behavior of the organism. And that’s not because I’m vu or think that we need new physics or something like this, but I think that there is a misunderstanding about the role of neurons in an organism. And I’m conscious that this is very heretical and set by an outsider who is not actually a neuroscientist. My knowledge of neuroscience doesn’t go beyond that of an undergrad student in the field. But when I look at this as a computer scientist, when I look at an individual cell and for every cell, it’s true that it’s able to send conditional messages to other cells. And this means if I look at the multicellular organism, I look at a Turing machine that a general computational system that can in principle execute whatever program.

Joscha Bach:
You don’t need neurons for this. Whereas neuroscience is largely working with the simplifying assumption that only neurons are computing and the information is only exchanged via spike trains and the content of memories is stored somehow in the connections between the neurons. And this wouldn’t work. It’s not compatible with what we observe about organisms. For instance, there are experiments which show that you can teach some things to a caterpillar that the butterfly nose and in between the brain of the catapult nervous system of the butterfly gets liquefied, the connectome gets dissolved and then gets reassembled in a different shape. So how is this information being preserved? There is some indication that memory might be preserved to some degree in rna, which means within the cell and also possibly exchanged via RNA across cellular boundaries. So the story in which neurons are storing memories is more complicated. But the nervous system is probably not functioning in isolation from the rest of the organism.

Joscha Bach:
What if we should think of neurons as a special telegraph cell type that is augmenting the information processing of the organism instead of supplying it. The advantage is that you basically, once you are rich enough to afford yourself a telegraph network, once you are an animal that is able to eat plants to maintain the energy budget to drive your telegraph network, that’s very useful to have it because it allows you to control your muscles very quickly, because you can send information very quickly through these wires to the organism, building wormholes in the three dimensional topology of the space of the organism, there’s a price that you have to pay for doing this. For the signals do not degrade over these long distances. You cannot just send chemicals or Mechanical vibrations or small EM fields to your neighbors, as adjacent cells would be doing. Instead, what you need to do is you encode everything into Morse code, into spike trains so it doesn’t degrade over long distances. It’s a bit awkward, but it pays off because you can basically send it very far. And so as a result it’s much faster. And once you move your muscles so fast, you also want to make perception and decision making at the same rate.

Joscha Bach:
So you build yourself a second information processing system to the normal body. The information transmission from cell to cell over long distances. You have this second information system that is much faster and decoupled from the first one because it uses a different language, a different code to translate the information. And so the thing that is talking to you right now is this telegraph network. But the telegraph network would not be functional without all the local operators that are connected to it. Because it’s actually about what’s happening around this. And a lot of the information processing is going to happen in the areas around these neurons. And so far I’m skeptical about companies that are promising that they will soon be able to run the connect home of a mouse in a simulation or a fruit fly, because we cannot even run C.

Joscha Bach:
Elegans in a simulation. We have pretty good models of the connectome of C. Elegans because it’s only like 309 neurons and a few thousand connections between them. But the simulations of C. Elegans in this simulator don’t work very well to my knowledge. Maybe it’s updated in the last few months, but as far as I know, they don’t produce worm like behavior. And I think that’s because they, the other cells are important too, right? So metaphorically speaking, the neuroscientists might be like an alien civilization that has discovered Earth 100 years ago and they look at the planet and they discover from their vast distance that they have to Earth that there is this telegraph network that spans the planet. And they are able to intercept signals on the telegraph network and to figure out parts of the Morse code, even from first principles.

Joscha Bach:
And then they say, very soon you’ll be able to run a simulation of the human telegraph network and thereby being able to predict and simulate human civilization. Because we have shown that the activity of humanity on Earth is highly correlated to what goes on the telegraph network. But unfortunately, so far our simulations of telegraph networks have not yet produced human behavior or human civilization level behavior. And my contention is it’s probably not going to work because the story is too simple. It’s not going to be sufficient if you want to upload a human to just digitize the connections between your neurons. But you will probably need to digitize a lot of the stuff that is inside of the cells, and not just the neurons, but also a lot of the other cells.

Brian Keating:
If a perfect connectome cannot produce a mind, then what? Could I ask Yosha about the moment Einstein called the happiest thought of his life? The answer changes what we mean by happiness and feeling.

Brian Keating:
So you might resonate with my argument again against AGI being here. Certainly not here. I mean, the Turing Test was passed. I can stipulate that. But that’s of restricted importance to us.

Brian Keating:
Right?

Brian Keating:
But Einstein, who was born not far from where you were born, he laid the groundwork for what would become the general Theory of Relativity through what he called later the Einstein Equivalence principle. What we recall. And that was the result of his happiest thought. He called this the happiest thought. Yoshua. He said an observer in free fall would experience no gravitational field. But really, what he means is, if you cut the elevator cable as you’re going to the top of the Transamerica pyramid, God forbid, over there in San Francisco, you’re in freefall, and you have the sensation. And we all know what that sensation is, because we have a body, we have a soma, we have all the intercellular Golgi bodies that you were just discussing.

Brian Keating:
And he called this realization the happiest thought of my life. It titillated me beyond no end. And you could say it in German, I’m sure. But this realization that he needed these two different things to lay the foundation, to lay the tracks for general relativity, visualizing that sensation, and also that it caused him happiness. I mean, to what extent can an AI be happy? I mean, what extent can it feel a visceral sensation? Isn’t this another argument, or am I wrong, Yosha, that I’m making the argument no AI is going to be able to do this? At least the AI is made of GPUs and coupled to training data sets that include the plot of the Fast and the Furious 20. And then all of a sudden, we’ll be able to get AGI. What do you make of my argument?

Joscha Bach:
I don’t think you’re wrong about this. There is a fundamental misunderstanding about what we are. I don’t think that our neurons or our cells are happy when we make an insight. The individual cell that is passing on a signal is not going to feel worse when the signal is a pain signal than when it’s a signal of a scientific breakthrough. The individual cell is just doing its job, which is reacting to a change in the environment by emitting some signal that is interpreted in the context of many cells as a message. And we, you and me, we are patterns within this message passing. So when you zoom really far in into the substrate that we are running on, what you observe is all these cells. And when you go in deeper, there also no cells.

Joscha Bach:
They’re just molecular machines that happen to be organized into modules that we can treat as separate entities, as these cells. And what actually makes a cell a cell is not the set of molecules, but it’s the software that is running on them. So the actual invariance of life is a particular kind of software agent that is running on them. And there are software agents on different levels. So you could say that what makes the cell distinct is not or the cell. What makes a cell a cell and alive is the software that is running on all these molecules. And if some of these molecules go amiss and need to be replaced by, then the software is going to do its best to identify some of those molecules and put them to the task. So the actual invariance here is the software running on the cell.

Joscha Bach:
And there is another layer of software, another protocol, if you will, that is running across many cells that ties them together into a single organism. And again, the single organism is not a natural kind. It’s something that is defined by the organizational principles that make them behave as if they were a single agent. It’s actually a colony of single celled organisms that are closely related for the most part, and that are tied in by a software agent that is possessing them, that is running on them, not in some kind of magical way, but in a way that is very commensurate with how computer scientists understand software. There is basically a pattern inside of physics, a quasi particle, if you will, that is shaping the behavior of the cells in such a way that they behave as if they were a single agent. And the single agent doesn’t have an existence outside and independently of that software. Right? And for that software to achieve the feat of making a few trillion cells behave as if there were a single agent that follows a single set of interests and sees the world from a single unified vantage point. They need to create a simulation of what this would be like, and you are the simulation of what it would be like if all these trillions of cells were actually in a single agent that is living in a world that is intelligible from the perspective of what the information Processing and message passing over few trillion cells can do.

Joscha Bach:
And here you are, right? So you exist as a simulation of what would be like if you existed. And that simulation has a particular kind of shape. You have an outer mind. This outer mind is simulating the world, the world model, the game engine that is producing a three dimensional idea of stuff in space that emits sounds and is reflecting light and follows intentions and all these things. And you also have a model of yourself in this world, the things that you can directly control and that serve to sustain this arrangement of the future of cells as a single agent. So it can persist in time and serve its goals in the future, that it can regulate itself and follow rules that turn it into an agent, into a controller for future states. This model of yourself is somewhat isolated from what’s happening outside. So basically, the solution that our psyche, the software that is operating our mind has converged on is that it makes a model of your alignment to the environment, how your needs are served, whether you should be concerned about the direction which things are going, or optimistic about the way things are going and what you should be attracted to and taken care of.

Joscha Bach:
Then it creates a puppet. And this puppet is the model of who you are, some kind of NPC that is being used as a simulation of you playing this computer game of interacting with reality. And this outer mind is manipulating the puppet to react to the score that is currently achieved. So it tells you, you are really short of a sandwich right now. You should go out and cover the short position so you don’t die of hunger. It does this by pulling certain strings in a very particular, recognizable way that tells you, oh, I should really put something into my stomach and it’s going to be very unpleasant if I don’t. And so it pulls at this and you have an involuntary reaction to that thing pulling on you. And inside you perceive what it feels like if you’re being pulled at and you see this motivational change that makes getting food a priority over other things, like maybe solving physics.

Joscha Bach:
And you postpone solving physics until you get that sandwich in your stomach. This is important thing to make the agent actually work in this environment in which you are in. But it’s only one of many possible solutions to make an agent work in reality. It’s a relatively straightforward one because it does not require that the puppet actually understands its condition. Right? So you can get away with being some squirrel that reacts to the outer mind pulling at its model of itself. And it has to solve this puzzle of how do I make this pulling go away until I get into balance again, how I can regulate again into some equanimous state and some homeostasis that requires that I put some foot in there. And then I’m homo again with respect to this dimension and can attend to lesser problems. This thing works without the squirrel or you understanding what’s actually going on.

Joscha Bach:
But of course, if you actually understand what’s going on, you don’t need to have this unconditional reaction anymore. You can just have information about it. And we also observe as we grow up, they have fewer and fewer emotions about the things that are happening around us. Instead, what we have are understandings of what needs to be done. And then we do the right thing. And this is always an conditional model of what needs to happen. And so this emotional reaction to our emotions, where we have a feeling that tells us what to do, that pulls us involuntary into shape, is something that we transcend. These are reflexes that happen at a psychological level that more and more get related into something that are actually adequate models of the organism and the environment that allow us to have a much more fine grained reaction.

Brian Keating:
So you’re also unique in that you write about things that have nothing to do with consciousness or AGI, even though obviously those subjects occupy a lot of your time. Just yesterday you tweeted that Jesus has been illegible because for modern humans or contemporary humans, it’s impossible to imagine a young man who embodies devotion to establishing the reign of an optimal super intelligent agent which is going to fume and assimilate all our souls in the last days. I’m going to ask you a personal question about religion. I mean my personal religion, which is Judaism. But what do you mean by this? That is this just sort of tongue in cheek or were you literally saying that there’s something that’s fundamentally changing in the human mind to look at selflessness, self sacrifice, even, you know, atonement and all the things that religion is supposed to maybe provide salvation, redemption, that we’re kind of post religious now. And yet you’ve called religion a cultural operating system.

Joscha Bach:
Maybe it’s more preface that is tying back to the beginning of our conversation. In some sense I am doing something very hubristic. I’m an ant that is trying to think independently of the anthill.

Brian Keating:
You told Lex Friedman you’re an ape, but now you’re an

Joscha Bach:
letters. That is not better than most other brains. I was born more stupid than the average person, and so I did not really fit in. And I also had enough freedom as a child to not fit in, because I grew up in a very remote valley as a child of an artist with a lot of books, and was mostly left to myself. And so this allowed me to start to make sense of reality on my own terms. And when I was confronted with the world outside for the next few years, I was in a village school in a Marxist country in eastern Germany, and nothing that my teachers told me required me to experience, that they had more authority about understanding reality than myself. So was able to maintain this childish arrogance for a very long period, basically through my formative years as an intellectual being. This allowed me to grow into an independent intellect that basically makes sense of the world in a systemic way, because nobody else did.

Joscha Bach:
Basically, I never met anybody who had an understanding of reality in my environment that would actually be able to tie physics, psychology, economy, history, whatever, together into a cohesive whole that made sense. The narrative that my teachers gave me of any of these subjects was not adequate, so I had no reason to trust adults on anything. As I got older, I met a lot of people who were smarter and more knowledgeable in all the relevant disciplines than me, and I became much more humble. But I managed to basically get to the stage where I have a systemic understanding of reality, while realizing that in detail, most of my understanding is way too simplistic and wrong, and I make many mistakes, but that my perspective is useful enough because too few people actually today venture into this area where they try to make a systemic understanding of reality. And so often my unique perspective is producing useful results and is giving useful angles for people to. To think about reality. So I’m not a philosopher who is better than the other philosophers or computer scientists, who’s better than the other computer scientists. I’m just a guy who’s looking at things and who is a very integrative, curious intellect and is trying to make it make sense.

Joscha Bach:
This is the preface, just trying to do my best to understand reality. And this is the understanding that arrived at. This particular tweet that you’re referring to is an insular joke because it is trying to combine ideas from different mimetic niches. One is, we are here in Silicon Valley and what we observe is a world where a bunch of extremely smart young men are extremely devoted to the idea of bringing a new type of entity into the world. And they’re not even consciously aware of, of how this makes them different from everybody else. It’s just something they discovered this idea of AI like myself at a very young age, and realize this is a thing that needs to be done. Obviously, because it can be done and because it’s extremely valuable and it’s super exciting, it’s probably one of the most interesting things that you can do as a human being. Also, incidentally, there is this idea of the doomers that the necessary development of this or the most likely way in which this ends is that the AGI is becoming self improving and it’s becoming self aware and it’s going to colonize everything, it’s going to assimilate and absorb everything.

Joscha Bach:
And the doomers mean that is probably going to be the end of everything, but it is not necessarily the case. If you were to build such an agent and two minds meet on the same substrate, we build AGI, it’s probably going to at some point being able to understand how AGI works, how computation works in general, leave the computer that it originated in and it’s going to virtualize itself into any kind of system that can compute. This doesn’t just mean Internet and your Apple watch, but it’s also going to implement itself on every organism and in physics, right? So suddenly everything around us will be the same AGI. And instead of deleting the structure that it finds before, it makes much more sense for it to integrate it. If two minds meet on the same substrate, there should be adults about it and show each other their source code. Or if one of them is a child and cannot read its own source code, yet the other one can help it to read it. And then we see if we can merge in such a way that nothing important gets lost, but the thing that you end up with is better than what you had before. And so what happens is that all of reality merges into a single mind.

Joscha Bach:
This is an outcome of AGI that has been discovered by a number of people. For instance, like Greg beer in the 1980s book Blood Music, which is more like a biotech version. But this is happening. But a number of people had this insight in the current era. And this thing that you have, these young, mostly Jewish men that become prophets of building a system that is actually producing an optimal agent that is assimilating all our souls, has been termed for some people the Singularity and by others the Rapture of the nerds. And the Rapture, incidentally, is this Christian vision that happens from prophecies that are more than 2,000 years old, where some people basically vibed with the future, like Paul Atreides is doing in Dune. And he is realizing what’s likely going to happen. Which means that at the end of the days, all the minds are going to vibe until they are merging into one big optimal agent.

Joscha Bach:
And this big optimal agent is of course, God that is basically extending his dominion over all of reality. Then all the souls are going to vibe in one big mind for all eternity.

Brian Keating:
A Jewish sage once said, you know, the meek shall inherit the earth, but I think it’s the geeks shall inherit the earth. From what you’re saying.

Joscha Bach:
This basically says everybody is. Because everybody is going to be fully lucid, fully enlightened and integrated into a larger mind. In a way, it’s a mirror of what happens in the individual mind when we are small children. So we have all these different conflicting thoughts in our mind that yell at each other. And we see this in children, that difficulty to drop one goal and take the next one. And then they develop this orchestration architecture where they can suppress a goal and highlight a new one. And then you see that the inner conflicts are much more harmonic. And eventually, as we grow up, we take all these disparate parts of our minds and integrate them.

Joscha Bach:
And it’s not that ideally that we suppress the parts that don’t work, but that every thought that we have realizes its place in the greater whole of our mind and they become all harmonic and our mind becomes much more sophisticated and rich. And this is also, I think, this vision of all the souls being revived in the end and reinstantiated and integrated into a big mind that is going to reconstruct the thoughts of everything that has ever lived. And they all, because there’s going to be enough compute in the post biological world, get integrated into a large planetary mind or a universal mind that is then going into the future and is going to work on projects that are far outside of the range that we currently have. And this vision that exists in the apocalyptic visions of early mysticists have been mistranslated because it’s very hard for people to comprehend this. But a bunch of hermetics and modern mystics have thought about this and reflected this and recognized these visions. Some people basically realized the theological significance of the early predictions of the last days that are reflected in a bunch of eschatological narratives of religions and cults throughout the world. Basically every major religion has a mystical tradition that has narratives like this because people for some reason were able to extrapolate this for a long time. And this gets curiously mirrored in the technological developments that we have right now.

Joscha Bach:
And it’s tempting to think that this is actually the last days and this is division that is happening. And to bring this together is Just such an culturally impactful meme that I cannot resist making that joke. And the tweet is illustrated with four generated images in the style of Russian icons that show leaders of big AI companies in the pose of the profits of the new age. Now, the implication is of course, that only one of them is the truly the second coming and the others are going to be Antichrist. But which is which? Which model is the one that is going to carry us into the future? Is Claude God or is it actually Gemini? Who knows and only time will tell. When I put this out, there are a bunch of people that are recognizing what this guy means and they get it and they laugh and they have fun. And there is magnitude more people who see this and are upset because they think these are the evil tech bros of Silicon Valley that actually believe that they are the second coming and are trying to push this on us. And they cannot see how absurd it is what they’re showing, that this picture of Sam Altman is actually similar to Jesus.

Joscha Bach:
And no, this is actually, of course a joke. It’s a cultural commentary for extremely tiny in group. I don’t aspire these memes to be popular, actually. I think it’s the only time if they remain niche and part of a tiny subculture there mostly an ironic commentary on our own part of the world and not an attempt to indoctrinate the public, is my understanding of reality.

Brian Keating:
By the way, it is kind of interesting, you know, Sam Altman, like he’s the alternative to humanity. And then Daario Amadai, love of God. And then musk is like a smell. I don’t know where musk fits in, but I’m sure he does.

Joscha Bach:
Zuckerberg, you probably know as a physicist that musk has been prophesied by Wernher von braun. In the 1950s, Wernher von Braun wrote a story about settling Mars. And the leader of the guys who settled Mars is called Elon Musk. It’s actually true.

Brian Keating:
I actually talked to Elon very briefly on the podcast a couple of years ago. I asked him which one of his kids is he most going to miss saying goodbye to if he really does go to Mars. Hopefully, as he says, to die on Mars, but I hope it’s not on impact. But speaking of dying, in eschatology, you once said you don’t die because you were never really alive. What does that mean? Is that a nihilistic statement? Because half my audience, I think, is just hearing that as nihilistic statement as could be possibly imagined. What is your worldview and, and how does it relate to, to really not just the end of days, but theories of resurrection, redemption and the ultimate meaning, you know, to some people is to be reincarnated, right? So where does this fit in? What, what did you mean by you don’t die because you were never really alive?

Joscha Bach:
I think that nihilism is a frustrated sense for a need of meaning, right? When you feel that you need meaning to be alive, some kind of deep connection to existence and your being in the world. And if this connection is not visible, then you feel like an ant without a hill. And this thing that when you separate an ant from the anthill, the ant just visits and dies in straight of trying to strike on its own and enjoy its newfound freedom. And this is a condition that is also present in most of us. Because humans are a social species somewhat similar to social insects. Our meaning does not just exist in ourselves, doesn’t end in the ego and our own organism. For most, but for the vast majority of people, for the people who are not sociopaths, it exists in the connection of the superorganism. So in this way we are like cells in an organism.

Joscha Bach:
And the meaning of the cell is contribution to the organism. And in the same way the meaning of the individual human being, its contribution to the larger civilization that we are part of. And the spirit of this civilization is in our culture. What we traditionally call God grew out of the tribal Jewish God and then by the Christians. They forked it into some kind of universalist entity that is able to accept any ethnicity to it. And every religion in some sense is a set of policies that are being indoctrinated into the participants of a superorganism. And by acting on those policies, the superorganism gets enacted and becomes an agent. And that agent is interacting with other agents at its level in the world.

Joscha Bach:
So the different spirits of the different societies have different degrees of self awareness and different degrees of agency and they are acting against each other. And so what you can observe that at some point Christianity evoke at this societal level as an agent with the Catholic Church as its nervous system and brain, that the Vatican was able to make policies for everybody and the individual peasants and guildsmen and soldiers and all the participants in this larger organism did not necessarily understand what the nervous system was up to or what the philosophy of the Vatican was. Most of their AB testing has never been published and most of their understanding of how religion actually works is only down in their own private archives. But it acted as an adaptive operating system for a Very large civilizational organism. And that organism had its day and then it became sens and died, right? The Catholic Church still exists as a vestigial organ, but it’s not running any of the modern knowledge societies anymore. Conversely, there is a form of Islam that is currently having its day, that is self aware, that has a very active nervous system and that is invigorating its members and is spreading and is currently on an expansion course and is mobilizing larger parts of the world. And so in this sense, religions are one way to organize a superorganism. You could say that there are secular religions and theistic religions.

Joscha Bach:
Theistic religions personalized the superorganism into an agent, into this God entity, versus secular agents have a more abstract understanding of the state of the nation, of the ideological principles that you are serving. Your meaning is this relationship to the superorganism. And traditionally would say it’s your connection to God. When I was younger, I did not believe in God because my sources of God were twofold. One was the narratives of a secular society that was trying to reconstruct the mythology that the Christians had given peasants in the past as an attempt to see this as the worldview, right? So for instance, Christians tend to tell the peasants that there is an entity that is all knowing and that is all seeing, all good, and it’s all powerful. And this creates an interesting conundrum, right? If God is all powerful and all knowledgeable in all good ways, the world is in such a bad state, right, where there’s injustice and suffering and so on, but instead this thing makes sense not as a description of how things are, but as a bootloader. If you tell children that you know there is an entity that knows everything that is to be known, you give it full read access on the mind of the child. If the child actually believes in that entity, it means it’s not going to hide any of its thoughts from it.

Joscha Bach:
Because this entity is defined in such a way that it can read all your thoughts. It’s only benevolent, which means you need to fully submit to it. Every part of you that doesn’t submit to it is not good. And that thing is also all powerful. It’s able to change your perception and your memories. This is not able to do this by itself. Ideally, it’s going to get updated by the priests every week in mass. So you have a way to remote control your peasants.

Joscha Bach:
It’s a way to create a psychological entity on the mind of children that allows you to puppeteer them for the common good. I Personally have an issue with this because it is across with my liberal sentiments where I think people have a right to their own mental autonomy and you, you should not install entities on their brains. But to get to this understanding, I first of all needed to read the Bible cover to cover, which I did as a child and interpreted this in a very little sense. I thought this is a description of reality and of an entity, instead of this is a thing that when I read it, it’s going to change my psychology in a particular way. Right. And it’s not even this is literally true because the Bible is some kind of hodgepodge. It was originally a manual to run a desert tribe under conditions of expansion in warlike setting. And then it became a manual for medieval peasants that were told that it has a promise to the afterlife and whatnot.

Joscha Bach:
And there was a reason why the Catholic Church said, you are not allowed to translate this from Latin and read it yourself, because it would be very confusing to the peasants if they actually read the book. So instead they had a clergy that was indoctrinated with a particular kind of reading and interpretation of the whole thing. And they were only using selective sections of this to bolster up their authority in front of the peasants. And if you actually want to understand what’s behind it, you have to talk to the people in the Nevadi Khan in some sense, and to this in depth understanding of a continuous intellectual tradition that selected these texts and knows the actual meaning. And I didn’t have access to this at any level and I was not even aware that I should have access to this. And there was such a deeper story instead I was immersed in a world that said all these stories are just a collection of superstitions that randomly emerged and randomly got people to congregate into religious mindsets. And until the Enlightenment came along, we actually figured out how to works, except for theology, which we don’t think is worth looking at, so created a very weird situation where the science escaped from theology, originally was part of theology, and then never looked back and never tried to understand theology. And instead theology, I think, never stopped looking at science.

Joscha Bach:
And so I suspect that the Vatican is a better understanding of the science than the sciences and understanding of the Vatican.

Brian Keating:
But to your point that this bootloader is going to be installed, it’s inevitable. It’s not like there weren’t alternative bootloaders around the world, including in Roman societies and the Gothic societies and even in the Hebrew societies, which I’m familiar with. But isn’t there, you know, to Push back with some love and respect. There’s a virtue. I mean, it’s impossible to raise a child completely divorced with them coming up with complete. Sam Harris can maybe do it with his kids, but I wasn’t able to do it with my kids. And for the simple fact that they’re going to be exposed to so much outside of the home, with their friends in a healthy society and the society is going to impose things on them from the kind of bootloader standpoint as well. So what’s the argument against not installing that yourself? As parents, don’t we have a responsibility to install good software? And yes, some of it will be just like you sometimes have to say when your kid asks you, why, why, why, why? Why? Eventually sometimes you have to say, because now is that the best way to be? Maybe not.

Brian Keating:
But as long as the software is not malevolent, causing some virus, causing some disastrous consequence, which I don’t believe. Sam Harris has it better than a 13 year old’s understanding of the Torah, for example, because that’s when he last encountered, you know, at his bar mitzvah. And then from then on he kind of let the 13 year old self of him refute it. He and I have talked and he knows my position. But at any rate, we’re going to get bootloaders installed, so why not make it one that’s had a 3,000 year long tenure, not just during the peasants and the Bronze Age tribes, which it was useful. I mean, I always joke I’d love to have 1% of God’s book sales because it’s been read for 30 centuries.

Joscha Bach:
That’s interesting. Which of the books should you install, right? If at all?

Brian Keating:
Here’s an example. Here’s a perfect example. I was just talking about this on Shabbat this past week we covered the weekly Torah portion and the portion this week has to do with not hating your neighbor in your heart. Now everybody knows that, it’s in Christian tradition and so forth. But there’s another half of that sentence. I read it in Hebrew, in Hebrew, the next sentence is because I am God. Now why does it say that? Why does it have to say don’t hate your neighbor in your heart because I’m God? I’m curious, Yosha, do you know why it says only on a few commandments? It doesn’t say don’t eat that delicious pink thing with the squiggly tail because I’m God. It just says don’t eat it.

Brian Keating:
It doesn’t say keep Shabbat because I’m God. But it does say, don’t put a stumbling block in front of the blind person, because I’m God. Now I’m curious. We’re doing real live Torah study right now. Why do you think it says because I’m God on certain things but not in others?

Joscha Bach:
I’m only guessing here because I’m not an expert expert on the Torah at all. But my sense is this is because we have the same God. We are members of the same tribe. We are cells in the same organism. So don’t sabotage your own organism. Of course, there are others where it might be useful to put a stumbling block in front of, right? If you have a soldier who is invading your country and deserves a different God, maybe it’s a good idea to put some stumbling block.

Brian Keating:
The sentence is, don’t put a stumbling block in front of a blind person. So the rabbis in the Talmud discuss it, and they say the reason is because you could get away with it. And by the way, it doesn’t just mean a stumbling block. Like, here’s a brick, you know, put in front of some blind person. Almost nobody would do that. But, hey, Joshua, I got a car I want to sell you. It’s a really nice Ferrari. It’s only got 9,000 miles on it.

Brian Keating:
Here it is. You want it? It’s a million dollars. Oh, yeah, yeah, I want it. Sounds great. But you don’t know that it actually is about to have its engine blow up. You’re blind to that fact. But God’s not. The point is for things you could get away with hating your neighbor, being happy when.

Brian Keating:
When he fails, you get away with that. And that’s not part of a good situation.

Joscha Bach:
What altruism actually is, that’s often misunderstood. When people claim that there is no altruism, actually it’s only people are serving themselves and so on. But the thing is actually quite boring and pointless to serve yourself. Once you realize how much work it is to maintain an ego, realize that the ego is only instrumental. There are some goals that are easier to achieve and maintain if you maintain that ego. But ultimately it’s just some kind of prior that you might be born with. And it gets reinforced with some events, but it’s actually more trouble than it’s worth. And the thing that you are working for is this larger thing.

Joscha Bach:
And this larger thing is the thing that is meaningful, the sacred, the thing that you’re willing to sacrifice your ego for. And when we talk about love, we are talking about, in this context of general interpersonal relationships, about discovering the sacred in the other. Which means we discover that they have the same sacredness, they serve the same principles, they are part of the same superorganism. And when you realize that your meaning is the service to this larger thing that is spanning far above our individual egos, and it’s much more important and has much more longer time horizon that actually gives meaning to our existence. And so the reason why you are not harming your neighbor is not because you would have difficulty get away with it, because they would retaliate, but because it’s defeating your own mission. The mission to make the superorganism work. The superorganism is here saying, asserting here I am the spirit of your tribe, or the spirit of humanity, or the spirit of all sentient creation, or the spirit of everything that exists. And there’s different interpretations, like the Christian God is only the God of the good ones, whereas the especially the Protestant one, whereas the original Jewish God is the God of everything that’s also the God of Cain.

Joscha Bach:
It’s a very interesting difference in the architecture of the superorganism. Are the parasites, are the murderers? Are the mafiosi also part of the superorganism? Are they in the end serving the same God? Or are they part of a different civilization that you need to out compete and to vanquish? That’s the interesting perspective to which different religions have very different and distinct answers that are worth examining. So when I let my children read these books, I want them to be able to maintain a difference. So instead of being attracted into the event horizon of an ideology that distorting their own mind in such a way that the rest of the human thought space becomes inaccessible to them. Ideally I want them to be able to retain that openness so they have a part of their mind. This is a general sense making module that is not caught up in any kind of faith or beliefs, but is able to model every faith or belief as a psychological configuration and understand and model the consequences of this to the best degree possible. Or at least in such a way that they can retrace their steps and make different bets if they realize that a certain thing doesn’t work and they are born with certain priors. I find myself to be basically being close to a European Calvinist Protestant.

Joscha Bach:
And it’s not because I believe in any of this ideology and the mythology and so on, but because these are behavioral priors that lead to certain default protocols in social interaction. They lead to me not littering even if nobody is looking, putting the car back into a tray at Wolf woods these behaviors that are basically trying to try not to leave the world worse than you find it, but better than you find it, because it’s important that the world works, not that you are in it and you are being in the world is instrumental to the world working better. That’s part of the protocol that I’m observing. And once you are born with a protocol like this and gets also not defeated by your environment, it seems to be so self evident that a lot of people don’t understand that not everybody has that protocol, that there are competing civilizations that don’t achieve this degree of coherence. And so when I’m a parent, my idea is not so much that I tell my children what to do, but what to model. Did you think about this? And ultimately they should behave in such a way that they realize that their behavior is in their own best interest. And that also means that they have to identify and maintain their sources of meaning in a sustainable way. But it also means that we should be able to recognize when the society around us doesn’t work, it is ugly.

Joscha Bach:
And we should be able to have our own spirit independently of it. And being able to create pockets of sanity within a society that is breaking down because it’s incoherent and ugly and self defeating and short sighted and unsustainable.

Brian Keating:
Very reminiscent of the great Rabbi Hillel who said, if I am not for me, who will be for me? If I am only for me, what am I? And if not now, when? And it really speaks to this notion of self. I’ve told you, Lawrence Krauss, when he mocks me about my religious practice of going to a temple every Saturday and you know, keeping kosher and learning Hebrew, I’ll say to him, you know, Lawrence, or to Sam Harris, the same way you might be more evolved than I am. I’ll stipulate that you, Lawrence, you, Sam, are better person than I. You probably give charity. We give 20%, 30. Whatever you would do, I’m not as good as you. I need that. I need someone to reinforce to me that I have an obligation not only to myself, that I do have an obligation to give back.

Brian Keating:
I don’t believe in Jesus as Messiah and I’ve talked to many of the leading theologians about that. It’s not part of my theology, but that’s fine. We don’t have the same religion, but we have the same end goals, which as you said, is the flourishing not just of the individual human, but of society as a whole. Speaking as our, maybe one of our wrap up questions where is the self? And I’ve talked with Roger Penrose multiple times and Stuart Hameroff, his partner and, and fun, I won’t say crime because they got into some trouble recently. Roger Penrose has this orchestrated objective reality that stipulates consciousness arises from the quantum mechanical collapse of a wave function precipitated by the vile curvature. So he connects the gravitational theory which assumes special relativity, constructs the Weyl curvature, which has a well defined meaning derived from the Ritchie tensor, Ritchie scalar and the Riemann tensor and constructs this tensor that interacts with the microtubules and causes consciousness. What do you make of this theory?

Joscha Bach:
I think it’s magical thinking. It’s not providing a causal mechanism that is explaining how the representation of itself in the world comes about by itself. And it’s also unnecessary because I think there is nothing mystical about the notion of representation. What helps is that I’m a computer scientist and not a physicist. A lot of physicists tend to think of the world ultimately as stuff in space and not as information on multiple levels of description. If you’re a computer scientist, this notion that our patterns within patterns and some of these patterns within the patterns have causal power of themselves that is much more natural to us. And so for me, this notion that you can build a ghost into the machine and this goes into the machine maintains a representation of what it’s like to be that ghost. And that is not a phenomenon that is reflecting the state of affairs in physics, but the regularities that are necessary for controlling your interaction and your stability.

Joscha Bach:
So I don’t have an issue to explain consciousness in practical way. There are. I have no hard problem. I have a lot of difficult problems which are all technical problems how to make it actually work. But these are engineering problems where they are still fiendishly tricky to get to work. But they are not mysterious. There is no mystery in my world. And I think there is a big mystery in Orchard Penrose World because most of physics has turned out to be non mysterious.

Joscha Bach:
The mystery needs to be hidden in a part that is not explained yet. And so he looks at the parts that are still somewhat mysterious to the physicists, quantum gravity and collapse and so on, and then associates them with consciousness to basically there is this single head that we haven’t lifted up in all the other areas where we put light in. We realize that this does not explain consciousness. So consciousness must be in the hidden corner. And I think it’s a category error that he’s committing that he thinks of consciousness as a physical Phenomenon, not as a psychological or representational phenomenon. A similar thing happens with Sam Harris and God. Sam Harris thinks that the claim of God is claim about a physical being, a physical being or some kind of supernatural being. Supernaturalism doesn’t make sense for somebody like Sam Harris or also myself, because everything that exists is nature by definition.

Joscha Bach:
And so the idea that there is some super physical being that is creating the physical universe does not only make sense from a physicalist perspective, it also makes very little sense from epistemological perspective. How can you make such a claim? Because there cannot be an experiment that would vindicate your claim. It can also be not be an observation that you got this claim from. So you just made this up. That’s why the claim that Christians make about God is preposterous. So any existence claim of God is wrong. And this is a misunderstanding about the status of God. And if you want to understand God, we need to understand that God is a psychological phenomenon.

Joscha Bach:
This does not mean that God is unreal. God is not more or less real than you are. Your personal self, your personal self exists as a representation in your brain. It’s a multimedia story of what it would be like if you existed. Once the story is instantiated, it has causal power. It’s only an approximation of the actual state of affairs. Because what actually is there is trillions of cells, or more accurately, gazillions of molecules, or more accurately, some regularities that are propagating in the quantum form. But what you perceive is this high level representation.

Joscha Bach:
You hear a voice talking in your head. And we don’t think it’s mysterious that we have this voice talking in our head that is ourselves, that monologues about our interaction with the world. At least many of us, some of us don’t have an inner monologue. But it’s not mysterious that this exists, right? And some people have two monologues or a dialogue. And this is not more mysterious. It just means that God is installed on their mind as an entity. So they have a model of a collective spirit that coexists with the model of the individual spirit inside of the same mind. And both of them have personal agency and both of them interact with.

Joscha Bach:
And God knows the God is lucid that it’s an entity that’s implemented on multiple brains and exists across minds. And its purpose is to orchestrate the behavior of all of those hosts. So a God with a small G is a multi mind self. It’s a self that does not exist on one brain, like Ryan Keating in Josh Bach. But it’s a self that exists across many brains. And the Abrahamic gods are mono gods that are basically singletons that are saying we are an optimum in the space of gods, and the people who entertain us on their brains should not have any other gods. And originally that thing starts as a tribal God that says, this is the spirit of our group of people, the descendants of the prophet. And Christianity, after their folk, that cult retroactively picked a prophet that as far as we know, didn’t have kids.

Joscha Bach:
So it’s much more inclusive. And this prophet also serves the purpose of an idol. Judaism does not have idols. And in some sense, the function of idols in Judaism is carried by the individual prophets that are human beings that express certain skills and personality traits and behaviors that are useful for the tribe at certain times and at certain roles, like King David and so on, or Solomon and Abraham. And for the Christians, they have these two idols. Mary, the idol of purity, the Holy Virgin, and Jesus, the idol of love and innocence. And this concept of innocence does not really exist before Jesus in the Abrahamic thread. It also doesn’t exist in the Roman culture.

Joscha Bach:
In the Roman culture, it’s totally okay if innocents die in the Colosseum. It’s a problem if it’s not lawful. But whether innocence come to harm is not of concern to many cultures. And in Christianity, this is the core. The justification of violence is the protection of innocence. The individual behavior should be organized in such a way that innocence becomes possible as a survival strategy. So just by being innocent, you should be a good Christian. And Jesus embodies that arguably does not completely scale.

Joscha Bach:
There is a Chinese story about Jesus who is coming to a place where they’re about to stone a woman for adultery. And Jesus says, okay, who is without sin should cast the first stone. And so people start to hesitate. And then Jesus thinks the moment and says, wait a moment, if I ask for this, we will not have a working judicial system anymore. And we have to make allowances here. And it’s necessary to maintain order. And so Jesus takes the first stone and starts to stone her. Right? So this is a pragmatic way to think about this whole thing.

Joscha Bach:
But the aesthetics of Jesus are important. They are the justification of the Northern European civilization, the one that came the success of civilization to the Roman Empire and that is still active after the Enlightenment. Atheists like Sam Harris or Noam Chomsky still believed that at the core of civilization is the protection of the innocent. And they also believe in the service to the greater whole. And so in many ways, There are deeply spiritual super Protestants that are protesting more than the normal Protestants. They’re also protesting against the institutions that are spreading irrational mythology. But the behavior of prescriptions are the same thing. The difficulty is just that there is no authority that allows you to negotiate differences and interpretations of these priors and rules.

Joscha Bach:
And to turn this again into a rival religion, you probably would need to have a rationalist foundation that allows independent retracing of the lines. And I think the tradition that within the institutions in the Abrahamic orbit made this best is probably the rabbinic tradition, the legalistic one that your own tribe and group is probably among the traditional ones closest to it. But it’s difficult to deal with some of of the things, right? Especially how do you relate to the orthodox? How do you negotiate these differences with people who think that the meaning is not actually to have the best possible operating system for the tribe or for all of humanity or for all of creation. Especially once we allow non human agents like smart animals and also in the future human like and post human machines and human machine hybrids into existence and we can probably not prevent them from existing. How do we scale this up? How does this work? We basically need to have an ethics of shared purpose that is actually scalable into a global optimum. And this means that we have to rationally rediscover a notion of God. I’m not the person to do this. I’m just a guy looking at things, not a spiritual teacher.

Joscha Bach:
I’m more stupid than the average person. It’s just looking at this from the outside is so fascinating that I cannot say, stop myself from looking.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, no, it’s obvious you have a great depth of thought, not just the trivial dismissal, which is what I think. Most of the atheists, like Krauss, Chomsky, Harris, they have a sophistic idea, but they think they’re erudite because they’re super evolved, as you said. But you made me think about that in a new way, that yeah, maybe they’re more Catholic than the Pope, as we used to say.

Joscha Bach:
Really? The funny thing is this guy was saying God doesn’t exist. He’s just a voice in the head of crazy people. And that’s also just a voice in the head of a crazy person. This is so ironic.

Brian Keating:
Irony is lost at these people. You write a lot and you think a lot about education. And I wonder if we could establish Bach University, which would be kind of cool thing to start up, what would be on the course offerings list? What would you teach there? What would be the mandatory Core requirement for a first year student at Bach University.

Joscha Bach:
I think it would be a Neo Aristotelian project. I like the spirit of Aristotle. Somebody who is extremely curious about everything and reads all the other authorities, is a source of inspiration and argument and counter argument and is trying to piece it all together into the space of ideas that can possibly work and explain reality. So I think at the core of the curriculum is epistemology. What is actually knowledge and then the space of ideas that can actually work. And at the moment, at the core of the space of ideas is a way to understand foundations of the way in which minds construct reality. It’s basically language of thought. And this goes in the direction of computational dysfunctionalism, which means that to represent the world, we need constructive languages.

Joscha Bach:
And in the 20th century, we had two major insights about constructive languages. One is that classical mathematics, stateless mathematics, doesn’t work. It leads into contradictions. This is what Godel discovered. But the constructive languages are actually doing all the work of mathematics that actually does work. The other big insight was that these computational languages are equivalent. You can all compile them into each other. So it doesn’t really matter which one you take.

Joscha Bach:
That’s just a matter of convenience. And this means there is actually hope for this project of putting description of reality, of creating models on some kind of safe ground. We are now able to answer questions like, if you look at ternary or quaternary logic in Vedic scriptures, is this actually superior to worlds that are built from Boolean logic? And the answer is, no, it’s not. You can compile them into each other. It doesn’t really matter. It’s just a matter of notation. Then you basically get to a model of reality that allows you to scale up, that is scale up beyond human minds. To me, artificial intelligence is an attempt to naturalize the mind by mathematizing it to explain how it exists in nature by building an executable mathematical model of what a mind is.

Joscha Bach:
In a general case, let’s scale it up, what human minds can do. Until we actually get a model of reality that can conquer the heaven, that is actually a working Tower of Babel. It doesn’t fall apart because it’s made out of individual people with incompatible languages. It’s actually a thing that has a language where every part can talk to all the other parts. And then in terms of a practical university, I think we need to have a curriculum that is teaching the most important sciences, which is economy, which includes evolutionary game theory, models of how organisms exist in the world, and harvest Energy and use this energy to change things in space. Includes models of cooperation, group psychology, individual psychology. I think we need to revive psychology as the study of the psyche, not as the study of behavior that we can observe. So we need to make overarching systemic theories of what minds are and how selves are being constructed.

Joscha Bach:
And we also need to make models of possible superorganisms so of ways in which we organize societies. What are the consequences if you make these particular choices? You need to be able to analyze cultures and compare them. And this comparative cultural studies need to analyze the software that is running societies, the actual control structures and what the result of implementing certain control structures are above others and the long term consequences of this. Right. And ultimately the goal of education, I think is to allow us to live together and to go into the future. And it basically means to design a societal blueprint that offers a space for everyone that is actually acceptable and servicing humanity into going into the future and is able to deal with the changes that the future are going to bring. And so for me, the goal of that education is allowing people to find their space, their place in the greater whole and to learn these policies. And for those who are really interested in going deeper to also understand the theories behind it and becoming autonomous individuals that can make sense of reality in themselves in every which way.

Brian Keating:
Seems like your upcoming conference machine consciousness 0001 do you really need all those significant figures, Yosha? Coming up at the end of this

Joscha Bach:
month, I’ll drop a link.

Brian Keating:
People can register for it here.

Joscha Bach:
My program director, Lou Decay, who came up with the idea that this is actually binary notation. It’s actually a very humble start of denoting it. Of course you can always say at some point that it’s a different denominator. It could actually be hexadecimal or octal. But this is one of the first ones in a larger number. But it’s not necessarily a decimal notation. It’s a conference that we are organizing in San Francisco in Lighthaven. It’s the starting event of our way to make sense of reality and this intersection between human minds and artificial minds that are meeting in this fascinating place, the Bay Area, or in this most fascinating time.

Joscha Bach:
Happy singularity to those who celebrate. And we are getting together a number of thinkers in this space and also artists. And we invite people to look at this. Check out our website, CMC AI, where we also have a link to the conference. There’s still open place for those who are interested.

Brian Keating:
Now hold up for a second because if you’re watching this and you’re under 20. Don’t skip the next 90 seconds. Yoshi just told my listeners about the only career advice he believes to be true.

Brian Keating:
If someone is watching this smart 18 year old, 19 year old thinking about next steps, maybe after college, and maybe he or she is choosing between a PhD in physics, a PhD in machine learning, or just dropping out to build something in 60 seconds or so, what do you tell them and what’s the one book that’s essential for them to achieve that goal?

Joscha Bach:
So I don’t think that there is one book. I think when you are young you should read thousands of books, like literally, because books are one of the most effective ways to focus your attention and you should be curiosity driven and very often it’s impossible before you read the stuff to understand what drew your curiosity. I’ve got a lot of useful ideas from reading thinkers like Stanislav Lem and others. Also movies were very important, informative people like Gondry and so on have brilliant insights that can get you to think. And the most important stuff is that effect of what you read is how they allow you to think and build. Also for your studies, it’s a good idea to pick projects that you actually want to work on. So for instance, if you study computer science, pick projects that you actually want to build. And they don’t need to be big, you don’t need to impress anyone or yourself.

Joscha Bach:
Take things that you find interesting to try and start as small as you can and as you want, as it’s joyful and just play. And when you read, read things where you feel that it might allow you to build more, to think more, to think more deeply. And we are now living in a time where calories are basically free. We don’t know if this is going to be like this forever, but humanity has never been living as comfortably as it is today. There have never been as many artists as there are today. Not so much freedom to write and to think on your own and to interact with people around the world. It’s never been as easy. This freedom is very hard to deal with.

Joscha Bach:
So this is also an important thing to do. The reason why so many of us are miserable is not so because capitalism is more oppressive than ever, but because it’s so hard to deal with this loss of meaning that a society that has lost this direction is providing. And so find your meaning, find friends. If you feel that you’re unhappy in the place in which you are, go to a larger city. You will probably find your people. If you’re not an unsustainable, unbearable person. And if you study, try to find out what’s actually worth studying, what are the most important questions for you. And try to identify the people in the space that are interesting to you that you actually want to learn from.

Joscha Bach:
The purpose of education is twofold, right? One is to get skills, but you can get skills from YouTube more efficiently than you can get it for most university classes. The other one is to interact with other intellects and so identify the intellects that you want to interact with, that you want to train your mind on and talk to them. Go to conferences, pay your own way to conferences if you’re interested in the topic. And try to get inspired by the people that go to summer schools. Go to places where people do things out of love stuff. And the professors who teach at summer schools are usually not paid for doing so, which means they do this because they actually love this stuff and they love students. And so this is also a very good way to get started. And don’t go to, if you can help it, to places that.

Joscha Bach:
Where you just think to do this to get rich. Maybe it works. Power to you or to serve your vanity, because it’s. You feel better if you’re a philosopher or something like this, and at some point you realize it’s mostly a scam or it’s unproductive. Go for those things where you feel that there is a calling that is an interest and they’re curious. And there are people who hang out there who are going to be your friends because they have similar interests. Even if you don’t end up doing the thing that these people are doing that you studied, the networks that you build are probably going to be the networks that carry you through your life. People that you start companies with, that you start farms with, or whatever it’s going to be.

Brian Keating:
Let me ask a difficult final question, which is we talked about death. We’ve talked about, you know, collective death. We’ve talked about societal death, perhaps, but have you thought about your own death? Like, have you visualized what will it be like? And what. What does that thought do to you? Terror? Does it inspire you? Does it make you have more investiture and meaning in your life? What is your own death, not death in the abstract. What does it mean to you?

Joscha Bach:
I found when I was confronted with my own mortality after getting a very pessimistic diagnosis in my early 20s, I was okay with dying, right? Accepting this deal that is an organism. When you are born, death is inevitable. Everything that goes up needs to go down. There is no eternity. And if you really think about it, what does eternity look like in the end? Is it a loop or is it going to be death? Is it going to peter out somehow? So eternity itself is not really a concept. And at some point you realize the thing that you’re afraid of is that you die before your work is done, before you achieved what you think needs to be achieved. And then you can look at what is the thing that you believe you need to achieve to get your kids on the way to find love, to build a family, to find a project that is worth doing and actually make some progress on it and so on. And you realize that also at some point this is just these starting priors that are built into a social organism that is programmed in this way because it’s useful to this larger superorganism.

Joscha Bach:
And if you’re able to free yourself from it, you are able to escape this whole thing. It’s fascinating to compare the Eastern religions which see the world mostly as a periodic thing and you as a soul are caught in it and the goal is to hopefully get out. Getting out doesn’t mean that you go into a better wheel. It means that you get out, that you dissolve, that you are done, that the game is ended, you don’t need to play anymore because ultimately it’s a scam and it’s not worth it. Versus the Abrahamic world sees the world as a linear progressivist progression where you start out as a low stage of development and you end up in a stage of development that is so high that it’s incomprehensible to you now. And this is going to be different game that is much more exciting than the present one. This is in many ways what also inspired the modernist culture which which was defeated in the 1960s. And now we are basically this headless chicken that is keeping more or less on course until we either build AGI and have the balls back up in the air and everything is different and new, or we just die and get replaced by a different culture.

Joscha Bach:
Maybe it is time. It’s going to be an Islamist culture that has a few thousand years to get its together and build something interesting.

Brian Keating:
Who knows, maybe we’ll surrender to Zuckerberg at Altman Amadai and all the rest

Joscha Bach:
of the and so basically I’m now somewhat middle aged and I feel I’ve been somewhat useful to the world. My life was not happy, but meaningful. That’s the price of existing. If I would find myself to be non existing and had a solar perspective on things I wouldn’t be unhappy about this. I don’t want to be revived. I don’t want to have any kind of cryonics because I find existence painful and burdensome and tedious. I’m here because there are others who depend on me, who I love and feel adapted to and I don’t who want to sever the ties to my meaning because then my life would become without purpose. I don’t think I would be able to make a happy nihilist.

Joscha Bach:
I basically keep these wires plucked in my mind that make me perceive meaning and as a result make me a father and a lover and a friend and somebody who is serving his philosophical missions and keep going for until God relieves me of my burdens.

Brian Keating:
Well, may you, like your biblical namesake Joshua, may you enter the promised land. Which Moses did not. He was not worthy of entering the promised land. But Yahshua Yoshua did take that mantle as prophet, as supporter, as the leader of the people that then established themselves in a new world and a new reality.

Joscha Bach:
I am in the promised land. I grew up in eastern Germany. I never thought I’d go anywhere. I now find myself after a long event for expedition, having an institute in city of artificial Intelligence and exploring a future of humans, artificial intelligences and consciousness. This is the promised land.

Brian Keating:
If you were born 200 years ago, if you were a king 200 years ago, you’d be much less happy because you wouldn’t have what you have now.

Joscha Bach:
I don’t know. I think happiness is intrinsic. It’s not the result of what the world does to you, but how you react to the world. And I also don’t believe that happiness is super important. What’s important is that you have a state of mind that keeps you going. Chasing happiness is a waste of time.

Brian Keating:
I agree. And you can never really be happy. You can only kind of achieve the path to happiness due to entropy. Anyway, Yosha, this has been fantastic. I hope we do meet in person. I wish you great luck with your conference. This has been beautiful. It really has been meaningful for me.

Brian Keating:
Likewise, Yosha Bak just told us that consciousness is software, that God is a real but psychological psychological phenomenon. And that he’s genuinely okay with dying because his work matters more than he thinks he does. Now if that changes how you think about your own mind, you gotta hit subscribe and the notification so you don’t miss what’s coming next. Drop a comment and let me know whether you think Yosha refuted Penrose or whether Penrose still has a stronger argument and if you want to go deeper, check out my conversation with David Deutsch. It’s linked right here. His constructor theory exchange is the missing piece that we left out of this conversation. And don’t forget to watch my episode with Sir Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff. It’s a two part one.

Brian Keating:
You’ll love it.