Joscha Bach
speaker
510 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Aug 2023
last heard 23 Jan
Joscha Bach’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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, right? 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 build addition is some basically syntactic sugar in it.
And so I wish that somebody would have opened me this vista and explained to me how I can build a language in my own mind from which I can derive what I'm seeing and which I can make predictions. 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.
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 as 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, merged space. And we also have these experiments where we notice that the way in which our 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 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.
So if telepathy would work, how could it work? 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. 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 that plants have spirits as a superstition. And I think we probably have to rediscover that, that plants have software running on them. And we already did, right?
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 has a nervous system 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, like 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 the 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 build 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 time frame, 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.
Of course, you can use any kind of physical signal. You can use sounds, you can use electromagnetic waves that are integrated over many cells. 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.
Yeah, 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 it 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 in the forwards, they 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.
So if you think about what the mind is, it's a bunch of activation waves that form coherent patterns and process information in a way that are colonizing an environment well enough to allow the continuous sustenance of the mind, the continuous stability and self-stabilization of the mind.
Showing 181–200 of 510 · page 10 of 26
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