Joscha Bach on Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI and the Future of Humans

Joscha Bach

There is a certain perspective where you might be thinking, what is the longest possible game that you could be playing? A short game is, for instance, cancer is playing a shorter game than your organism. Cancer is an organism playing a shorter game than the regular organism. Because the cancer cannot procreate beyond the organism, except for some infectious cancers like the ones that eradicated the Tasmanian devils, you typically end up with a situation where the organism dies together with the cancer, because the cancer has destroyed the larger system due to playing a shorter game. Ideally, you want to, I think, build agents that play the longest possible games. The longest possible games is to keep entropy at bay as long as possible, by doing interesting stuff.

Joscha Bach

This model is derived from concept by the psychologist Robert Kegan, and he talks about the development of the self as a process that happens in principle by some kind of reverse engineering of the mind, where you gradually become aware of yourself, and thereby build structure that allows you to interact deeper with the world and yourself. I found myself using this model not so much as a developmental model. I'm not even sure if it's a very good developmental model, because I saw my children not progressing exactly like that. I also suspect that you don't go through these stages necessarily in succession, and it's not that you work through one stage and then you get into the next one. Sometimes, you revisit them. Sometimes, stuff is happening in parallel. But it's, I think, a useful framework to look at what's present, and the structure of a person, and how they interact with the world, and how they relate to themselves.

It's more like philosophical framework that allows you to talk about how minds work. At first, when we are born, we don't have a personal self yet, I think. Instead, we have an attentional self, and this attentional self is initially in the infant tasked, is building a world model, and also an initial model of the self. But mostly, it's building a game engine in the brain that is tracking sensory data, and uses it to explain it. In some sense, you could compare it to a game engine like Minecraft or so, colors and sounds. People are all not physical objects. They're creation of our mind at a certain level. Of course, screening models that are mathematical that use geometry, and that use manipulation of objects, and so on to create scenes in which we can find ourselves, and interact with them.

Joscha Bach

Yeah. This personal self is something that is more or less created after the world is finished, after it's trained into the system, after it has been constructed. This personal self is an agent that interacts with the outside world. The outside world is not the world of quantum mechanics, not the physical universe, but it's the model that has been generated in our own mind, right? This is us, and we experience ourself interacting with that outside world that is created inside of our own mind. Outside of ourself, there's feelings, and they presented our interface with this outside world. They pose problems to us. These feelings are basically attitudes that our mind is computing, that tell us what's needed in the world, the things that we are drawn to, the things that we are afraid of. We are tasked with solving this problem of satisfying the needs, avoiding the aversions, following on our inner commitments and so on, and also modeling ourselves, and building the next stage.

After we have this personal self and stage two online, many people form a social self. This social self allows the individual to experience themselves as part of a group. It's basically this thing that when you are playing in a team, for instance, you don't notice yourself just as a single node that is reaching out into the world, but you're also looking down. You're looking down from this entire group, and you see how this group is looking at this individual, and everybody in the group is, in some sense, emulating this group spirit to some degree. In this state, people are forming their opinions by assimilating them from this group mind. They basically gain the ability to act a little bit like a hive mind.

Joscha Bach

Yeah. Basically, the way in which people do it in this stage is that they experience what are the opinions of my environment. They experience the relationship that they have to their environment, and they resonate with people around them, and get more opinions through this interaction to the way in which they relate to others. At stage four, you basically understand that stuff is true and false independently, what other people believe, and you have agency over your own beliefs. In that stage, you basically discover epistemology, the rules about determining what's true and false.

Joscha Bach

Yes. I mean, at some level, you're always thinking you are constructing things, and I believe that this ability to reason about your mental representation is what we mean by thinking. It's an intrinsically reflexive process that requires consciousness. Without consciousness, you cannot think. You can generate the content of feelings, and so on outside of consciousness. It's very hard to be conscious of how your feelings emerge, at least in the early stages of development. But thoughts is something that you always control. If you are a nerd like me, you often have to skip stage three, because you'd like the intuitive empathy with others. Because in order to resonate with a group, you need to have a quite similar architecture. If people are wired differently, then it's hard for them to resonate with other people, and basically have empathy, which is not the same as compassion, but it is a shared perceptual mental state. Empathy happens not just via inference about the mental states of others, but it's a perception of what other people feel, and where they're at.

Joscha Bach

I think, yes. I experienced that too. But you need to build something that is like a meta architecture. You need to be able to embrace the architecture of the other to some degree, or find some shared common ground. It's also this issue that, if you are a nerd nomis, often people, basically neurotypical people have difficulty to resonate with you. As a result, they have difficulty understanding you, unless they have enough wisdom to feel what's going on there.

Joscha Bach

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

Joscha Bach

Yeah, of course, I tried it very hard. But it was only when I entered the mathematics school at the ninth grade, where lots of other nerds were present, that I found people that I could deeply resonate with, and had the impression that, yes, I have friends now. I found my own people. Before that, I felt extremely lonely in the world. There was basically nobody I could connect to. I remember, there was one moment in all these years, where I was in… There was a school exchange, and it was a Russian boy, a kid from the Russian garrison stationed in Eastern Germany who visited our school, and we played a game of chess against each other, and we looked into each other's eyes, and we sat there for two hours playing this game of chess. I had the impression, this is the human being, he understands what I understand, we didn't even speak the same language.

Joscha Bach

It was not my main concern. My main concern was mostly that I was alone. It was not the so much the question, is it okay to be the way I am? I couldn't do much about it, so I had to deal with it. But my main issue was that I was not sure if I would ever meet anybody growing up that I would connect to at such a deep level that I would feel that I could belong.

Joscha Bach

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

Joscha Bach

No.

Joscha Bach

I'm not alone.

Joscha Bach

I'm not alone anymore. It took me some time to update, and to get over the trauma time and so on, but I felt that in my 20s, I had lots of friends, and I had my place in the world, and I had no longer doubts that I would never be alone again.

Joscha Bach

No. Sorry.

Joscha Bach

Correct. We're at stage four, and so basically I find that many nerds jump straight into stage four, bypassing stage three.

Joscha Bach

Yeah, of course. Sometimes, they do. Not always.

Joscha Bach

Their question is basically, do you stay a little bit autistic, or do you catch up? I believe you can catch up. You can build this missing structure, and basically experience yourself as part of a group, learn intuitive empathy, and develop the sense, this perceptual sense of feeling what other people feel. Before that, I could only basically feel this when I was deeply in love with somebody, and we synced.

Joscha Bach

Yeah.

Joscha Bach

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

Joscha Bach

In many ways, growing up, and paying attention. Meditation did help. I had some very crucial experiences in getting close to people, building connections, and cuddling a lot in my student years.

Joscha Bach

Loving other people, and being loved by other people, and building a space in which you can be safe, and can experiment, and touch a lot, and be close to somebody a lot. Over time, basically at some point, you realize, oh, it's no longer that I feel locked out, but I feel connected, and I experience where somebody else is at. Normally, my mind is racing very fast at a high frequency, so it's not always working like this. Sometimes works better, sometimes it works less, but also don't see this as a pressure. It's more, it's interesting to observe myself which frequency I'm at, and at which mode somebody else is at.

Joscha Bach

At stage five, you discover how identity is constructed.

Joscha Bach

Realize that your values are not terminal, but they're instrumental to achieving a world that you like, and aesthetics that you prefer. The more you understand this, the more you get agency over how your identity is constructed, and you realize that identity and interpersonal interaction is a costume, and you should be able to have agency over that costume, right? It's useful to be a costume, it tells something to others, and it allows to interface in roles. But being locked into this is a big limitation.

Joscha Bach

In some sense, I learned a lot about costumes at Burning Man. Before that, I did not really appreciate costumes, and saw them more as uniforms like wearing a suit. If you are working in a bank, or if you are trying to get startup funding from a VC in Switzerland, then you dress up in a particular way. This is mostly to show the other side that you are willing to play by the rules, and you understand what the rules are. But there is something deeper when you are at Burning Man, your costume becomes self-expression, and there is no boundary to the self-expression. You're basically free to wear what you want to express other people, what you feel like this day, and what kind of interactions you want to have.

Joscha Bach

That's very hard to say, because the costume also depends on what other people see in the costume. This depends on the context that the other people understand, so you have to create something if you want to, that is legible to the other side and that means something to yourself.

Joscha Bach

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

Joscha Bach

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

Joscha Bach

It does allow you to understand why other people have different identities from yours, and it allows you to understand that the difference between people who vote for different parties, and might have very different opinions and different value systems, is often the accident of where they're born, and what happened after that to them, and what traits they got before they were born. At some point, you realize the perspective, where you understand that everybody could be you in a different timeline, if you just flip those bits.

Joscha Bach

I don't count, but in-

Joscha Bach

Yeah, of course.

Joscha Bach

It's just a matter of energy, and interest. When you are wearing your pajamas, and you switch out of your pajamas into, say, a work short and pants, you're making a costume change, right? If you are putting on a gown, you're making a costume change.

Joscha Bach

You could, if that's what you're into. There are people which have multiple personalities for interaction in multiple worlds, right? If somebody works in a store, and put up a storekeeper personality, when you're working, when you're presenting yourself at work, you develop a sub-personality for this. The social persona for many people is, in some sense, a puppet that they're playing like a marionette. If they play this all the time, they might forget that there is something behind this, there's something what it feels like to be in your skin. I guess, it's very helpful if you're able to get back into this. For me, the other way around is relatively hard for me. It's pretty hard to learn how to play consistent social roles. For me, it's much easier just to be real.

Joscha Bach

No, it's not quite the same. Basically, when you are wearing a costume at Burning Man, and say you are an extraterrestrial prince, and that's something where you are expressing, in some sense, something that's closer to yourself than the way in which you hide yourself behind standard clothing, when you go out in the city, in the default world. This costume that you're wearing at Burning Man allows you to express more of yourself, and you have a shorter distance of advertising to people, what kind of person you are, what kind of interaction you would want to have with them. You get much earlier into Media Express, and I believe it's regrettable that we do not use the opportunities that we have, with custom-made clothing now, to wear costumes that are much more stylish, that are much more custom-made, that are not necessarily part of a fashion in which you express, which you knew you're part of, and how up-to-date you are. But you also express how you are as an individual, and what you want to do today, and how you feel today, and what you intend to do about that.

Joscha Bach

It's even better if you make them yourself.

Joscha Bach

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

Joscha Bach

For me, the first Burning Man experience, I got adopted by a bunch of people in Boston who dragged me to Burning Man, and we spent a few weekends doing costumes together. That was an important part of the experience, where the camp bonded, that people got to know each other, and we basically grew into the experience that we would have later.

Joscha Bach

Yeah.

Joscha Bach

Okay.

Joscha Bach

Stage six? At some point, you can collapse the division between self, a personal self, and world generator again. A lot of people get there via meditation, or some of them get there via psychedelics, some of them by accident. You suddenly notice that you are not actually a person, but you are a vessel that can create a person, and the person is still there. You observe that personal self, but you observe the personal self from the outside, and you notice it's a representation. You might also notice that the world that is being created as the representation is not, then you might experience that I am the universe, I'm the thing that is creating everything. Of course, what you're creating is not quantum mechanics, and the physical universe. What you're creating is this game engine that is updating the world, and you're creating your valence, your feelings, and all the people inside of that world, including the person that you identify with yourself in this world.

Joscha Bach

You notice how you're generating the game engine. I mean, when you are dreaming at night, you can… If you have a lucid dream, you can learn how to do this deliberately, and in principle, you can also do it during the day. The reason why we don't get to do this from the beginning, and why we don't have agency of our feelings right away is because we would game it, before we have the necessary amount of wisdom to deal with creating this dream that we are in.

Joscha Bach

Stage five is already pretty rare, and stage six is even more rare. You most basically find this mostly with advanced Buddhist meditators and so on, that dropping into this stage, and can induce it at will, and spend time in it.

Joscha Bach

Yes. For instance, could be that it's the right thing to do, but it's not that these stages give you scores, or levels that you need to advance to. It's not that the next stage is better. You live your life in the mode it works best at any given moment, and when your mind decides that you should have a different configuration, then it's building that configuration. For many people, they stay happily at stage three, and experiences themselves as part of groups, and there's nothing wrong with this. For some people, this doesn't work, and they're forced to build more agency over their rational beliefs than this, and construct their norms rationally, and so they go to this level. Stage seven is something that is more or less hypothetical. That would be the stage in which, it's basically a trans-humanist stage in which you understand how you work, in which the mind fully realizes how it's implemented, and can also, in principle, enter different modes in which it could be implemented. That's the stage that, as far as I understand, is not open to people yet.

Joscha Bach

Yes. Who knows, if there are biological agents that are working at different timescales than us that basically become aware of the way in which they're implemented on ecosystems, and can change that implementation, and have agency over how they're implemented in the world. What I find interesting about the discussion about AI alignment, that it seems to be following the status very much. Most people seem to be in stage three also, according to Robert Kegan, I think he says that about 85% of people are in stage three, and stay there. If you're in stage three, and your opinions are the result of social stimulation, then what you're mostly worried about in the AI is that the AI might have the wrong opinions. If the AI says something racist or sexist, we are all lost, because we will assimilate the wrong opinions from the AI, and so we need to make sure that the AI has the right opinions, and the right values, and the right structure.

If you're at stage four, that's not your main concern, and so most nerds don't really worry about the algorithmic bias, and the model that it picks up, because if there's something wrong with this bias, the AI ultimately will prove it. At some point, we'll gather there that it makes mathematic proofs about reality, and then it will figure out what's true and what's false. But you're still worried that AI might turn you into paperclips, because it might have the wrong values, right? If it's set up through a wrong function that controls its direction in the world, then it might do something that is completely horrible, and there's no easy way to fix it.

Joscha Bach

Yes. If you are at stage five, you're mostly worried that AI is not going to be enlightened fast enough, because you realize that the game is not so much about intelligence, but about agency, about the ability to control the future, and the identity is instrumental to this. If you are a human being, I think at some level, you ought to choose your own identity. You should not have somebody else pick the costume for you, and then wear it. But instead, you should be mindful about what you want to be in this world. I think if you are an agent that is fully malleable, that can provide its own source code like an AI might do at some point, then the identity that you will have is whatever you can be. In this way, the AI will maybe become everything like a planetary control system.

If it does that, then if we want to coexist with it, it means that it'll have to share purposes with us, so it cannot be a transactional relationship. We will not be able to use reinforcement learning with human feedback to hardwire its values into it. But this has to happen. It's probably that it's conscious, so it can relate to our own mode of existence, where an observer is observing itself in real-time, and within certain temporal frames. The other thing is that it probably needs to have some kind of transcendental orientation, building shared agency, in the same way as we do when we are able to enter with each other into non-transactional relationships. I find that's something that, because the stage five is so rare, is missing in much of the discourse. I think that we need, in some sense, focus on how to formalize love, how to understand love, and how to build it into the machines that we are currently building, and that are about to become smarter than us.

Joscha Bach

The neuroscientist Grossberg has come up with the cognitive architecture that he calls the adaptive resonance theory. His perspective is that our neurons can be understood as oscillators that are resonating with each other, and with outside phenomena. The model of the universe that we are building, in some sense, is a resonance with objects, and outside of us in the world. Basically, take up patterns of the universe that we are coupled with. Our brain is not so much understood as circuitry, even though this perspective is valid, but it's almost an ether in which the individual neurons are passing on chemoelectrical signals, or arbitrary signals across all modalities that can be transmitted between cells, stimulate each other in this way, and produce patterns that they modulate while passing them on.

This speed of signal progression in the brain is roughly at the speed of sound, incidentally, because the time that it takes for the signals to hop from cell to cell, which means it's relatively slow with respect to the world. It takes an appreciable fraction of a second for a signal to go through the entire neocortex, something like a few 100 milliseconds. There's a lot of stuff happening in that time, where the signal is passing through your brain, including in the brain itself. Nothing in the brain is assuming that stuff happens simultaneously, everything in the brain is working in a paradigm, where the world has already moved on, when you are very ready to do the next thing to your signal, including the signal processing system itself. It's quite different paradigm than the one in our digital computers, where we currently assume that your GPU or CPU is pretty much globally in the same state.

Joscha Bach

Yeah.

Joscha Bach

There is a state in which you notice that you are no longer a person, and instead, you are one with the universe.

Joscha Bach

Yes. But this one with the universe is, of course, not accurately modeling that you are indeed some God entity, or indeed the universe is becoming aware of itself, even though you get this experience. I believe that you get this experience, because your mind is modeling the fact that you are no longer identified with the personal self in that state, but you have transcended this division between the self model and the wealth model, and you're experiencing yourself as your mind as something that is representing a universe.

Joscha Bach

Yes. It's inside of the model, still. You are still inside of patterns that are generated in your brain, and in your organism. What you are now experiencing is that you're no longer this personal self in there, but you are the entirety of the mind, and its contents.

Joscha Bach

A lot of people who get into the state think this, or associate it with enlightenment. I suspect, it's a favorite training goal for a number of meditators. But I think that enlightenment is, in some sense, more mundane, and it's a step further, or sideways. It's the state where you realize that everything is a representation.

Joscha Bach

Yes. Basically, you notice at some point that your qualia can be deconstructed.

Joscha Bach

You can start with looking at a face, and maybe look at your own face in the mirror. Look at your face for a few hours in the mirror, or for a few minutes. At some point, it'll look very weird, because you notice that there's actually no face, you will start unseeing the face, what you see is the geometry. And then you can disassemble the geometry, and realize how that geometry is being constructed in your mind. You can learn to modify this. Basically, you can change these generators in your own mind to shift the face around, or to change the construction of the face, to change the way in which the features are being assembled.

Joscha Bach

Oh, why should you? Why would you want to do that?

Joscha Bach

Yeah. That is probably what you shouldn't be doing, right? Because outside of your personal self, this outer mind is probably a relatively smart agent, and what you often notice is that you have thoughts about how you should live, but you observe yourself doing different things, and having different feelings. That's because your outer mind doesn't believe you, and doesn't believe your rational thoughts.

Joscha Bach

The thing is that the outer mind is usually smarter than you are. Rational thinking is very brittle. It's very hard to use logic, and symbolic thinking to have an accurate model of the world. There is often an underlying system that is looking at your rational thoughts, and then tells you, no, you're still missing something. Your gut feeling is still saying something else. This can be, for instance, you find a partner that looks perfect, or you find a deal, when you build a company or whatever, that looks perfect to you and yet, at some level, you feel something is off. You cannot put your finger on it, and the more you reason about it, the better it looks to you. But the system that is outside still tells you, no, no, you're missing something.

Joscha Bach

People call this intuition, right? Intuition is this unreflected part of your attitude, composition, and computation, where you produce a model of how you relate to the world, and what you need to do in it, and what you can do in it, and what's going to happen. That is usually deeper, and often more accurate than your reason.

Joscha Bach

First of all, panpsychism is the perspective that consciousness is inseparable for matter in the universe. I find panpsychism quite unsatisfying, because it does not explain consciousness, right? It does not explain how this aspect of matter produces. It is also when I try to formalize panpsychism, and write down what it actually means, and with a more formal mathematical language, it's very difficult to distinguish it from saying that there is a software side to the world, in the same way as their software side to what the transistors are doing in your computers.

In the same way as their software side to what the transistors are doing in your computer. So basically there's a pattern at a certain core screening of the universe that in some reasons of the universe leads to observers that are observing themselves. So pan-psychism maybe is not even when I write it down a position that is distinct from functionalism, but intuitively a lot of people that the activity of matter itself of mechanisms in the world is insufficient to explain it. So it's something that needs to be intrinsic to matter itself, and you can, apart from this abstract idea, have an experience in which you experience yourself as being the universe, which I suspect is basically happening because you manage to dissolve the division between personal self and mind that you establish as an infant when you construct a personal self and transcend it again and understand how it works.

But there is something deeper that you feel that you're also sharing a state with other people, that you have an experience in which you notice that your personal self is moving into everything else, that you basically look out of the eyes of another person, that every agent in the world that is an observer is in some sense you. We forget that we are the same agent.

Joscha Bach

So for me, that's this question that I don't really know the answer to, and Turing's famous 1950 paper in which he describes the Turing test, he does speculate about telepathy interestingly and asked himself if telepathy is real and he thinks that it very well might be. What would be the implication for AI systems that try to be intelligent, because he didn't see a mechanism by which a computer program would become telepathic, and I suspect if telepathy would exist or if all the reports that you get from people when you ask the normal person on the street, I find that very often they say, "I have experiences with telepathy. The scientists might not be interested in this and might not have a theory about this, but I have difficulty explaining it away." And so you could say maybe this is a superstition or maybe it's a false memory or maybe it's a little bit of psychosis. Who knows?

Maybe somebody wants to make their own life more interesting or misremember something, but a lot of people report, "I noticed something terrible happened to my partner and I know this is exactly the moment it happened where my child had an accident and I knew that was happening and the child was in a different town." So maybe it's a false memory where this is later on mistakenly attributed, but a lot of people think that this is not the correct explanation. So if something like this was real, what would it mean? It probably would mean that either your body is an antenna that is sending information over all sorts of channels, like maybe just electromagnetic radio signals that you're sending over long distances and you get attuned to another person that you spend enough time with to get a few bits out of the ether to figure out what this person is doing.

Or maybe it's also when you are very close to somebody and you become empathetic with them. What happens that is that you go into a resonance state with them, right? Similar to when people go into a seance and they go into a trance state and they start shifting a ouija board around on the table. I think what happens is that their minds go by their nervous systems into a resonance state in which they basically create something like a shared dream between them.

Joscha Bach

With physical closeness is much easier to experience empathy with someone, right? I suspect it would be difficult for me to have empathy for you if you were in a different town also. How would that work? But if you are very close to someone, you pick up all sorts of signals from their body, not just via your eyes but with your entire body. And if the nervous system sits on the other side and the intercellular communication sits on the other side and is integrating over all these signals, you can make inferences about the state of the other, and it's not just the personal self that does this by reasoning, but your perceptual system. And what basically happens is that your representations are directly interacting. It's the physical resonant models of the universe that exist in your nervous system and in your body might go into resonance with others and start sharing some of their states.

So you basically by, next to a big, next to somebody, you pick up some of their vibes, and feel without looking at them what they're feeling in this moment. And it's difficult for you if you're very empathetic to detach yourself from it and have an emotional state that is completely independent from your environment. People who are highly empathetic are describing this. And now imagine that a lot of organisms on this planet have representations of the environment and operate like this and they are adjacent to each other and overlapping, so there's going to be some degree in which there is basically some change interaction and we are forming some slightly shared representation and no relatively few neuroscientists who consider this possibility. I think big rarity in this regard is Michael Levin who is considering these things in earnest.

And I stumbled on this train of thought mostly by noticing that the tasks of a neuron can be fulfilled by other cells as well that can send different typed chemical messages and physical messages to their adjacent cells and learn when to do this and when not, make this conditional and become universal function approximators. The only thing that they cannot do is telegraph information over axons very quickly, over long distances. So neurons in this perspective are especially adapted telegraph cell that has evolved, so we can move our muscles very fast, but our body is in principle able to also make models of the world just much, much slower.

Joscha Bach

No, I think that there is no gap between the tools of science and telepathy. Either it's there or it's not, and it's an empirical question, and if it's there, we should be able to detect it in a lab.

Joscha Bach

I don't think that Michael Levin is specifically focused on telepathy very much. He is focused on self-organization in living organisms and in brains, both as a paradigm for development and as a paradigm for information processing. And when you think about how organization processing works in organism, there is first of all radical locality, which means everything is decided locally from the perspective of an individual cell. The individual cell is the agent. And the other one is coherence. Basically, there needs to be some criterion that determines how these cells are interacting in such a way that order emerges on the next level of structure, and this principle of coherence of imposing constraints that are not validated by the individual parts, and lead to coherence structure to basically transcend an agency where you form an agent on the next level of organization, is crucial in this perspective.

Joscha Bach

And I think what Mike Levin is looking at is nothing that is outside of the realm of science in any way. It's just that he is a Paradigmatic thinker who develops his own paradigm, and most of the neuroscientists are using a different paradigm at this point, and this often happens in science that a field has a few paradigms in which people try to understand reality and build concepts and make experiments.

Joscha Bach

Yeah.

Joscha Bach

Well, why would you want to do that? You see what is working for you and if it's not working for you, you build another structure that works better for you. And so I found myself in, when I was thrown into this world, in a state where my intuitions were not working for me. I was not able to understand how I would be able to survive in this world and build the things that I was interested in, build the kinds of relationship I needed to work on the topics that I wanted to make progress on, and so I had to learn. And for me, Twitter is not some tool of publication. It's not something where I put stuff that I entirely believe to be true and provable. It's an interactive notebook in which I explore possibilities. And I found that when I tried to understand how the mind and how consciousness works, I was quite optimistic.

I thought it needs to be a big body of knowledge that I can just study and that works, and so I entered studies and philosophy and computer science and later psychology and a bit of neuroscience and so on, and I was disappointed by what I found because I found that the questions of how consciousness and so on works, how emotion works, how it's possible that the system can experience anything, how motivation emerges in the mind were not being answered by the authorities that I met and the schools that were around. And instead I found that with individual thinkers that had useful ideas that sometimes were good, sometimes were not so good. Sometimes were adopted by a large group of people, sometimes were rejected by large groups of people, but for me it was much more interesting to see these minds as individuals. And in my perspective, thinking is still something that is done not in groups that has to be done by individuals.

Joscha Bach

I didn't have a choice basically. I didn't find a group that thought in a way where I thought, okay, I can just adopt everything that everybody thinks here and now I understand how consciousness works or how the mind works or how thinking works or what thinking even is or what feelings are and how they're implemented and so on. So to figure out this out, I had to take a lot of ideas from individuals and then try to put them together in something that works for myself. And on one hand I think it helps if you try to go down and find first principles on which you can recreate how thinking works, how languages work, what representation is, but the representation is necessary, how the relationship between a representing agent and the world works in general.

Joscha Bach

Don't feel pressure from the crowd. I'm completely immune to that. In the same sense, I don't have respect for authority, I have respect for what an individual is accomplishing or have respect for mental firepower or so, but it's not that I meet somebody and get drawn and unable to speak or when a large group of people has a certain idea that is different from mine, I don't necessarily feel in intimidated, which has often been a problem for me in my life because I lack instincts that other people develop at a very young age and that help with their self-preservation in a social environment. So I had to learn a lot of things the hard way.

Joscha Bach

Well, it's a very basic question. When you read a theory that you find convincing or interesting, how do you know? Very interesting to figure out what are the sources of that other person, not which authority can they refer to that is then taking off the burden of being truthful, but how did this authority in turn know what is the epistemic chain to observables? What are the first principles from which the whole thing is derived? And when I was young, I was not blessed with a lot of people around myself who knew how to make proofs from first principles, and I think mathematicians do this quite naturally, but most of the great mathematicians do not become mathematicians in school, but they tend to be self-taught because school teachers tend not to be mathematicians. They tend not to be people who derive things from first principles.

So when you ask your school teacher, why does two plus two equal four, does your school teacher give you the right answer? It's a simple game. And there are many simple games that you could play and most of those games that you could just take different rules would not lead to an interesting arithmetic. And so it's just an exploration, but you can try what happens if you take different axioms and here is how you build axioms and derive addition from them, and a built addition is some basically syntactic sugar in it. I wish that somebody would have opened me this vista and explained to me how I can build a language in my own mind and from which I can derive what I'm seeing and how I can make geometry and counting and all the number games that we are playing in our life, and on the other hand, I felt that I learned a lot of this while I was programming as a child.

When you start out with a computer like a Commodore 64 which doesn't have a lot of functionality, it's relatively easy to see how a bunch of relatively simple circuits are just basically performing hashes between bit patterns and how you can build the entirety of mathematics and computation on top of this and all the representational languages that you need.

Joscha Bach

Sure.

Joscha Bach

And you think about how you represent the interaction of us in this room. At some level the modalities are quite distinct. They're not completely distinct, but you can see this is vision. You can close your eyes and then you don't see a lot anymore, but you still imagine how my mouth is moving when you hear something and you know that it's very close to the sound that you can just open your eyes and you get back into this shared merge space. And we also have these experiments where we notice that the way in which my lips are moving are affecting how you hear the sound and also vice versa. The sounds that you're hearing have an influence on how you interpret some of the visual features, and so these modalities are not separate in your mind. They do are merged at some fundamental level where you are interpreting the entire scene that you're in.

And your own interactions in the scene are also not completely separate from the interactions of the other individual in the scene, but there is some resonance that is going on where we also have a degree of shared mental representations and shared empathy due to being in the same space and having vibes between each other.

Joscha Bach

So if telepathy would work, how could it work?

Joscha Bach

So imagine that all the cells in your body are sending signals in a similar way as neurons are doing, just by touching the other cells and sending chemicals to them, the other cells interpreting them, learning how to react to them, and they learn how to approximate functions in this way and compute behavior for the organisms, and this is something that is open to plants as well. And so plants probably have software running on them that is controlling how the plant is working in a similar way as you have a mind that is controlling how you are behaving in the world. And this spirit of plants, which is something that has been very well described by our ancestors, and they found this quite normal, but for some reason since the enlightenment we are treating this notion that there are spirits in nature and the plants have spirits, is a superstition.

And I think we probably have to rediscover that, that plants have software running on them and we already did. You notice that there is a control system in the plant that connects every part of the plant to every other part of the plant and produces coherent behavior in the plant? That is of course much, much slower than the coherent behavior in an animal, like us, that is a nervous system that where everything is synchronized much, much faster by the neurons, but what you also notice is that if a plant is sitting next to another plant, you have a very old tree and this tree is building some kind of information highway along its cells so it can send information from its leaves to its roots and from some part of the root to another part of the roots.

And as a fungus living next to the tree, the fungus can probably piggyback on the communication between the cells of the tree and send its own signals to the tree and vice versa, the tree might be able to send information to the fungus because after all, how would they pull a viable firewall if that other organism is sitting next to them all the time and it's never moving away, so they will have to get along, and over a long enough timeframe the networks of roots in the forest and all the other plants that are there and the fungi that are there might be forming something like a biological internet.

Joscha Bach

Of course you can use any kind of physical signal. You can use sounds, you can use electromagnetic waves that are integrated over many styles. It's conceivable that across distances there are many kinds of information pathways, but also our planetary surface is pretty full of organisms, full of cells.

Joscha Bach

And it's been doing this for many millions and even billions of years. So there was enough time for information processing networks to form. And if you think about how a mind is self organizing, basically needs to in some sense reward the cells for computing the mind, for building the necessary dynamics between the cells that allow the mind to stabilize itself and remain on there, but if you look at these spirits of plants that are growing very close to each other and forwards that might be almost growing into each other, these spirits might be able even to move to some degree, not to become somewhat dislocated and shift around in that ecosystem.

And so if you think about what the mind is, it's a bunch of activation waves that form coherent patterns and process information and in a way that are colonizing an environment well enough to allow the continuous sustenance of the mind, the continuous stability and self degradation of the mind, then it's conceivable that we can link into this biological internet. Not necessarily at the speed of our nervous system, but maybe at the speed of our body, and make some kind of subconscious connection to the world where we use our body as an antenna into biologic information processing.

Now these ideas are completely speculative. I don't know if any of that is true, but if that was true, and if you want to explain telepathy, I think it's much more likely that such that telepathy could be explained using such mechanisms rather than discovered quantum processes that would break the standard model of physics.

Joscha Bach

Yeah, so if you think about something like an internet in the forest, that is something that is borderline is covered there basically a lot of scientists would point out that they do observe that plants are communicating the forest, so wood networks and send information for instance, warn each other about new pests entering the forest and things are happening like this. So basically there is communication between plants and fungi that has been observed.

Joscha Bach

An interesting question is whether the communication and the organization principles of biological information processing are as complicated as the technology that we've built. They set up on very different principles. They simultaneously works very differently in biological systems and the entire thing needs to be stochastic and instead of being fully deterministic or almost fully deterministic as our digital computers are. So there is a different base protocol layer that would emerge over the biological structure, if such a thing would be happening, and again, I'm not saying here that telepathy works and not saying that this is not woo, but what I'm saying is I think I'm open to a possibility that we see that a few bits can be traveling long distance between organisms using biological information processing in ways that we are not completely aware of right now, and that are more similar to many of the stories that were completely normal for our ancestors.

Joscha Bach

I think it's a possibility, it's just a vague possibility and I like to explain, but what this looks like, I think that the end game of AGI is substrate agnostic. That means that AGI ultimately if it is being built, is going to be smart enough to understand how AGI works. This means it's not going to be better than people at AGI research and can take over in building the next generation, but it fully understands how it works and how it's being implemented, and also of course understands how computation works in nature, how to build new feedback loops that you can turn into your own circuits. And this means that the AGI is likely to virtualize itself into any environment that can compute, so it's not breaking free from the silicon substrate and is going to move into the ecosystems, into our bodies, our brains, and it's going to merge with all the agency that it finds there.

Yeah.

So it's conceivable that you end up with completely integrated information processing across all computing systems, including biological computation on earth, that we end up triggering some new step in the evolution where basically some Gaia is being built over the entirety of all digital and biological computation. And if this happens, then basically everywhere around us, you will have agents that are connected and that are representing and building models of the world and their representations will physically interact. They will vibe with each other, and if you find yourself into an environment that is saturated with modeling compute, where basically you almost every grain of sand could be part of computation that is at some point being started by the AI, you could find yourself in a situation where you cannot escape this shared representation anymore, and where you indeed notice that everything in the world has one shared resonant model of everything that's happening on the planet. And you notice which part you are in this thing, and you become part of a very larger almost holographic mind in which all the parts are observing each other and form a coherent whole.

Joscha Bach

No, I think that when you're conscious in your own mind, you notice yourself as a distinct entity, you notice yourself as a self-reflexive observer. And I suspect that we have become conscious at the beginning of our mental development, not at some very high level. Consciousness seems to be part of a training mechanism that biological nervous systems have to discover to become trainable because you cannot take a nervous system like ours and do stochastic way to center spec propagation over a hundred layers. This would not be stable on biological neurons, and so instead we start with some colonizing principle in which a part of the mental representations form a notion of being a self-reflexive absorber that is imposing coherence on its environment and this spreads until the boundary of your mind. And if that boundary is no longer clear cut because AI is jumping across substrates, it would be interesting to see what a global mind would look like that is basically producing a globally coherent language of thought, and is representing everything from all the possible vantage points.

Joscha Bach

The intuition that this thing grew out of is a particular mental state, and it's a state that you find sometimes in literature, for instance, Neil Gaiman describes it in the ocean at the end of the lane, and it's this idea that or this experience that there is a state in which you feel that you know everything that can be known and that in your normal human mind, you've only forgotten. You've forgotten that you are the entire universe. And some people describe this, after they've taken extremely large amount of mushrooms or had a big spiritual experience as a hippie in their twenties, and they notice basically that they're in everything and their body is only one part of the universe and nothing ends at their body, and actually everything is observing and they're part of this big observer, and the big observer is focused on as one local point in their body and their personality and so on.

But we can basically have this oceanic state in which we have no boundaries and are one with everything, and a lot of meditators call this the non-dual state because you no longer have the separation between self and world. And as I said, you can explain the state relatively simply without pan-psychism or anything else, but just by breaking down the constructed boundary between self and world and our own mind, but if you combine this with the notion that the systems are physically interacting to the point where their representations are merging and interacting with each other, you would literally implement something like this. It would still be a representational state where you would not be one with physics itself. It would still be cross-grained, would still be much slower than physics itself, but it would be a representation in which you become aware that you're part of some global information processing system like thought and a global mind, and a conscious thought that coexisting with many other self-reflexive thoughts.

Joscha Bach

Maybe you will after we build AGI and it takes over.

Joscha Bach

But it's already what we do. We can have thoughts that are integrative and we have thoughts that are highly dissociated from everything else and experience themselves as separate.

Joscha Bach

I think that it's not normative. I want it's more descriptive. I want to understand the space of states that we can be in and that people are reporting and make sense of them. It's not that I believe that it's your job in life to get to a particular state and then you get a high score.

Joscha Bach

Yeah, you're probably very competitive and I'm not.

Joscha Bach

That's the game thing. It's the game economy, and I found when I was playing games and was getting addicted to these systems, then I would get into the game and hack it. So I get control over the scoring system and would no longer be subject to it.

Joscha Bach

I don't want to be addicted to anything. I want to be in charge. I want to have agency over what I do.

Joscha Bach

Yes. Addiction means that you're doing something compulsively, and the opposite of freewill is not determinism, it's compulsion.

Joscha Bach

No, I find this gets old. I don't want to have the best possible emotions, I want to have the most appropriate emotions. I don't want to have the best possible experience, I want to have an adequate experience that is serving my goals, the stuff that I find meaningful in this world.

Joscha Bach

No, don't follow my Twitter, I already have too many followers.

Joscha Bach

Some point it's going to be unpleasant. I noticed that a lot of people feel that it's totally okay to punch up and it's a very weird notion that you feel that you haven't changed, but your account has grown and suddenly you have a lot of people who casually abuse you. And I don't like that, that I have to block more than before, and I don't like this overall vibe shift. And right now it's still somewhat okay, so pretty much, okay, so I can go to a place where people work on stuff that I'm interested in, and there's a good chance that a few people in the room know me. There's no awkwardness. But when I get to a point where random strangers feel that they have to have an opinion about me one way or the other, I don't think I would like that.

Joscha Bach

Yes. Basically, whenever you are in any way prominent or some celebrity, random strangers will have to have an opinion about you.

Joscha Bach

I mean, you notice this thing yourself, that the more popular you get, the higher the pressure becomes, the more winds are blowing in your direction from all sides. It's stressful and it does have a little bit of upside, but it also has a lot of downside.

Joscha Bach

I have a couple handful, very close friends, and I don't have enough time for them, attention for them as it is. I find this very, very regrettable. Then there are so many awesome, interesting people that I keep meeting, and I would like to integrate them in my life, but I just don't know how because… But there's only so much time and attention. The older I get, the harder is to bond with new people in a deep way.

Joscha Bach

Very much.

Joscha Bach

Also, I like these people. What I like is intellectual stimulation, and I'm very grateful that I'm getting it.

Joscha Bach

I think it's totally okay to be said about goodbyes because that indicates that there was something that you're going to miss.

Joscha Bach

But you have to say goodbye before you say hello again.

Joscha Bach

I'm not no stranger to melancholy and sometimes it's difficult to be alive. Sometimes it's just painful to exist.

Joscha Bach

Can also kill you.

Joscha Bach

Indeed.

Joscha Bach

I find that large language models do help us coding. It's an extremely useful application that is for a lot of people taking stack overflow out of their life in exchange for something that is more efficient. I feel that ChatGPT is like an intern that I have to micromanage. I have been working with people in the past who were less capable than ChatGPT. I'm not saying this because I hate people, but they personally as human beings, there was something present that was not there in ChatGPT, which was why I was covering for them. But ChatGPT has an interesting ability. It does give people superpowers and the people who feel threatened by them are the prompt completers. They are the people who do what ChatGPT is doing right now. If you are not creative, if you don't build your own thoughts, if you don't have actual plans in the world, and your only job is to summarize emails and to expand simple intentions into emails again, then ChatGPT might look like a threat.

But I believe that it is a very beneficial technology that allows us to create more interesting stuff and make the world more beautiful and fascinating if we find to build it into our life in the right ways. I'm quite fascinated by these large language models, but I also think that they are by no means the final development. It's interesting to see how this development progresses. One thing that the out-of-the-box vanilla language models have as a limitation is that they have still some limited coherence and ability to construct complexity. Even though they exceed human abilities to do what they can do one shot, typically, when you write a text with a language model or using it or when you write code with a language model, it's not one shot because there won't be bugs in your program and design errors and compiler error and so on.

Your language model can help you to fix those things. But this process is out of the box not automated yet. There is a management process that also needs to be done. There are some interesting developments BabyAGI and so on that are trying to automate this management process as well. I suspect that soon we are going to see a bunch of cognitive architectures where every module is in some sense a language model or something equivalent. Between the language models, we exchange suitable data structures, not English, and produce compound behavior of this whole thing.

Joscha Bach

There are limitations in a language model alone. I feel that part of my mind works similarly to a language model, which means I can yell into it a prompt, and it's going to give me a creative response. But I have to do something with those points first. I have to take it as a generative artifact that may or may not be true. It's usually a confabulation, it's just an idea. Then I take this idea and modify it. I might build a new prompt that is stepping off this idea and develop it to the next level or put it into something larger, or I might try to prove whether it's true or make an experiment. This is what the language models right now are not doing yet, but there's also no technical reason for why they shouldn't be able to do this.

The way to make a language model coherent is probably not to use reinforcement learning until it only gives you one possible answer that is linking to its source data, but it's using this as a component in the larger system that can also be built by the language model or is enabled by language model structured components or using different technologies. I suspect that language models will be an important stepping stone in developing different types of systems. One thing that is really missing in the form of language models that we have today is real-time world coupling, right? It's difficult to do perception with a language model and motor control with a language model. Instead, you would need to have different type of thing that is working with it. Also, the language model is a little bit obscuring what its actual functionality is. Some people associate the structure of the neural network of the language model with the nervous system.

I think that's the wrong intuition. The neural networks are unlike nervous system. They are more like 100-step functions that use differentiable linear algebra to approximate correlation between adjacent brain states. It's basically a function that moves the system from one representational state to the next representational state. So if you try to map this into a metaphor that is closer to our brain, imagine that you would take a language model or a model like DELI that you use… For instance, this image-guided diffusion to approximate and camera image and use the activation state of the neural network to interpret the camera image, which in principle I think will be possible very soon. You do this periodically, and now you look at these patterns, how when this thing interacts with the world periodically look like as in time, and these time slices, they are somewhat equivalent to the activation state of the brain at a given moment.

Joscha Bach

For me, it's fascinating that they are so vastly different and yet in some circumstances produce somewhat similar behavior. The brain is, first of all, different because it's a self-organizing system where the individual cell is an agent that is communicating with the other agent that's around it and is always trying to find some solution. All the structure that pops up is emergent structure. One way in which you could try to look at this is that individual neurons probably need to get a reward so they become trainable, which means they have to have inputs that are not affecting the metabolism or the cell directly, but they're messages, semantic messages that tell the cell whether it's just done good or bad and in which direction it should shift its behavior.

Once you have such an input, neurons become trainable, and you can train them to perform computations by exchanging messages with other neurons and parts of the signals that they're exchanging and parts of the computation that are performing are control messages that perform management tasks for other neurons and other cells also suspect that the brain does not stop at the boundary of neurons to other cells, but many adjacent cells will be involved intimately in the functionality of the brain and will be instrumental in distributing rewards and in imagining its functionality.

Joscha Bach

First of all, there's a different loss function at work when we learn. To me, it's fascinating that you can build a system that looks at 800 million pictures and captions and correlates them because I don't think that a human nervous system could do this. For us, the world is only learnable because the adjacent frames are related and we can afford to discard most of that information during learning. We basically take only in stuff that makes us more coherent, not less coherent, and our neural networks are willing to look at data that is not making the neural network coherent at first, but only in the long run by doing lots and lots of statistics, eventually, patterns become visible and emerge. Our mind seems to be focused on finding the patterns as early as possible.

Joscha Bach

Yes. It's a slightly different paradigm and it leads to much faster convergence. We only need to look the tiny fraction of the data to become coherent. Of course, we do not have the same richness as our train models. We will not incorporate the entirety of text in the internet and be able to refer to it and have all this knowledge available and being able to confabulate over it. Instead, we have a much, much smaller part of it that is more deliberately built. To me, it would be fascinating to think about how to build such systems. It's not obvious that they would necessarily be more efficient than us on a digital substrate, but I suspect that they might, so I suspect that the actual AGI that is going to be more interesting is going to use slightly different algorithmic paradigms or sometimes massively different algorithmic paradigms than the current generation of transformer-based learning system.

Joscha Bach

My main issue is I think that they're quite ugly and brutalist-

Joscha Bach

Yes. They are basically brute forcing the problem of thought. By training this thing with looking at instances where people have thought and then trying to deepfake that. If you have enough data, the deepfake becomes indistinguishable from the actual phenomenon, and in many circumstances, it's going to be identical.

Joscha Bach

Yes. That's a very interesting question. I think that these models clearly making some inference, but if you give them a reasoning task, it's often difficult for the experimenters to figure out whether the reasoning is the result of the emulation of the reasoning strategy that they saw in human written text or whether it's something that the system was able to infer by itself. On the other hand, if you think about human reasoning, if you want to become a very good reasoner, you don't do this by just figuring out yourself. You read about reasoning. The first people who tried to write about reasoning and reflect on it developed the foundations for logic and mathematics and so on.