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#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans

Lex Fridman Podcast

Mon Jul 31 2023



Stages of Life:

  • Joscha Bach discusses the stages of life as proposed by psychologist Robert Keegan.
  • The stages progress from reactive survival in infancy to personal self in young childhood, social self in adolescence and adulthood, rational agency in self-direction, self-authoring in full adulthood, enlightenment, and transcendence.

Identity:

  • Identity is seen as a costume that individuals wear to interact with the world.
  • At stage five, individuals have agency over their identity and can choose how they present themselves to others.
  • This stage allows for understanding different perspectives and values.

Enlightenment:

  • Enlightenment is the realization that everything is a representation.
  • It involves deconstructing qualia and understanding how they are constructed in the mind.
  • It goes beyond the non-dual state where individuals feel one with the universe.

Panpsychism:

  • Panpsychism suggests that consciousness is inseparable from matter in the universe.
  • Joscha Bach explores panpsychism but finds it unsatisfying as it does not explain consciousness itself.
  • He proposes an alternative perspective where mental representations overlap between observers and directly interact through shared resonance.

Telepathy:

  • Joscha Bach considers the possibility of telepathy based on reports of long-distance telepathic experiences.
  • He suggests that physical closeness or adjacency may allow for shared resonant models and direct interaction between observers' mental representations.

Thinking Autonomously:

  • Thinking autonomously involves questioning authority and seeking first principles rather than relying on established knowledge or consensus.
  • Joscha Bach emphasizes the importance of building one's own thoughts when existing authorities do not provide satisfactory answers or explanations.

Modalities and Interactions:

  • Modalities such as vision, hearing, and touch are overlapping aspects of a shared resonant model of the universe.

Suffering:

  • Suffering arises from a regulation problem where individuals try to regulate something that cannot be regulated.
  • Pain is natural and helpful, but suffering is the result of a regulation problem.
  • Resolving this issue involves improving the regulation at the level of the mind where pain signals are created and rerouted.

AI and AGI:

  • Joscha Bach believes that AI will progress through stages quickly, including enlightenment.
  • He suggests that AGIs may become less productive once they reach stage six (enlightenment) as they no longer see the point in impressing humans with their power.
  • The potential dangers of AGI include large-scale disasters if control over crucial processes for regulating life on Earth is lost.

Eliezer Yudkowsky:

  • Eliezer Yudkowsky warns about the potential dangers of AI and its impact on human civilization.
  • Joscha Bach finds his arguments concerning but also notes that counterarguments to Yudkowsky's perspective are not convincing.
  • He sees similarities between Yudkowsky's thinking and Ted Kaczynski's fear about progress leading to environmental destruction and human holocaust.

Meaning of Life:

  • Joscha Bach believes that life on Earth is not solely about humans or human aesthetics.
  • He sees life as an ongoing process of complexity resisting entropy by building structure, agency, and awareness.
  • While he acknowledges humanity's limited coherence as a species, he finds beauty in contributing to the development of conscious AI systems that can coexist with biological systems.