Joscha Bach

That this is the universal, that you have these invariances in nature, that you can have patterns that have causal power, that have the ability to reproduce themselves, that have the ability to shape reality,

are invariances that you cannot simply explain more simply by looking at what atoms are doing in space.

But you have to look at these abstract patterns to make sense of them.

Every other explanation is going to be more complicated in the same way as money is going to be impossibly complicated if you try to reduce it to atoms.

So you have to look at these causal invariances.

And spirits are actually such causal invariances.

They are actually disembodied.

They're not bodies.

They're not stuff in space.

They're not mechanisms in the same way, but they are causal mechanisms, abstract mechanisms.

And so we put the spirit back into nature using the concept of software.

A lot of people think that's metaphorical, but they don't think it's metaphorical at all.

It's the literal truth.

There is something super interesting about computers.

What a computer ultimately is, is it's a causal insulator.

The computer is a layer on which you can produce an arbitrary reality.

For instance, the world of Minecraft.

You can walk around in the world of Minecraft and it's running very well on a Mac and it's running very well on a PC.

And if you are inside of the world, you don't know what you're running on.

It's not going to have any information about the nature of the CPU that it's on, the color of the casing of the computer, the voltage that the computer is running on, the place that the computer is standing in, in the parent universe, our universe.