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
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 biological 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 telepathy could be explained using such mechanisms rather than undiscovered quantum processes that would break the standard model of physics.
Yeah, so if you think about something like an internet in the forest, that is something that is borderline discovered. Basically, a lot of scientists would point out that they do observe that plants are communicating the forest through 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.
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, right? The 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 Wu, 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.
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 breaking free from the silicon substrate and is going to move into the ecosystems, into our bodies, our brains. and is going to merge with all the agency that it finds there.
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...
And 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 in an environment that is saturated with modeling compute, where basically 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.
No, I think that when you are 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 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 radioresonance backpropagation over 100 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 observer 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.
It's basically producing a globally coherent language of thought and is representing everything from all the possible vantage points.
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. Right. And some people describe this after they've taken an extremely large amount of mushrooms or had a big spiritual experience as a hippie in their 20s, and they notice basically that they are in everything and their body is only one part of the universe and nothing ends at their body.
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