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
It's inflicted by the mind on the personal self that experiences itself as you. And you can turn off suffering when you are able to get on this outer level. So when you manage to... understand how the mind is producing pain and pleasure and fear and love and so on, then you can take charge of this and you get agency of whether you suffer.
Technically, what pain and pleasure is, they are learning signals, right? A part of your brain is sending a learning signal to another part of the brain to improve its performance. And sometimes this doesn't work because this trainer who sends the signal does not have a good model of how to improve the performance.
So it's sending a signal but the performance doesn't get better and then it might crank up the pain and it gets worse and worse and the behavior of the system may be even deteriorating as a result. But until this is resolved, this regulation issue, your pain is increasing. And this is, I think, typically what you describe as suffering.
So in this sense, you could say that pain is very natural and helpful, but suffering is the result of a regulation problem in which you try to regulate something that cannot actually be regulated. And that could be resolved if you would be able to get at the level of your mind where the pain signal is being created and rerouted and improve the regulation. And a lot of people get there, right?
If you are a monk who is spending decades reflecting about how their own psyche works, you can get to the point where you're they realize that suffering is really a choice. And you can choose how your mind is set up. And I don't think that AI would stay in the state where the personal self doesn't get agency or this model of what the system has about itself.
It doesn't get agency how it's actually implemented. It wouldn't stay in that state for very long.
Yeah. Of course, there might be a lot of stuff happening in between because if you have a system that works at a much higher frame rate than us, And even though it looks very short to us, maybe for the system there's a much longer subjective time, which things are unpleasant.
Well, of course it makes you lazy because you no longer see the point. So it doesn't make you not lazy. It just, in some sense, adapts you to what you perceive as your true circumstances.
Not necessarily. I suspect that the monks who are self-immolated for their political beliefs to make statements about the occupation of Tibet by China, they're probably being able to regulate their physical pain in any way they wanted to. And their suffering was the spiritual suffering that was the result of their choice that they made of what they wanted to identify as.
So stage five doesn't necessarily mean that you have no identity anymore, but you can choose your identity. You can make it instrumental to the world that you want to have.
One thing that I find concerning in the discussion of his arguments is that many people are dismissive of his arguments, but the counterarguments that they're giving are not very convincing to me. Based on this state of discussion, I find that from Eliezer's perspective, and I think I can take that perspective to some approximate degree,
That probably isn't normally at his intellectual level, but I think I see what he's up to and why he feels the way he does, and it makes total sense. I think that his perspective is somewhat similar to the perspective of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous lunar bomber. And not that Eliezer would be willing to send pipe bombs to anybody to blow them up, but
But when he wrote this Times article in which he warned about AI being likely to kill everybody and that we would need to stop its development or halt it, I think there is a risk that he's taking that somebody might get violent if they read this and get really, really scared. Right.
So I think that there is some consideration that he's making where he's already going in this direction where he has to take responsibility if something happens and people get harmed. And the reason why Ted Kaczynski did this was that from his own perspective, technological society cannot be made sustainable. It's doomed to fail. It's going to need change.
to an environmental and eventually also a human holocaust in which we die because of the environmental destruction, the destruction of our food chains, the pollution of the environment. And so from Kaczynski's perspective, we need to stop industrialization, we need to stop technology, we need to go back because he didn't see a way moving forward.
And I suspect that in some sense there's a similarity in Eliezer's thinking to this kind of fear about progress. And I'm not dismissive about this at all. I take it quite seriously.
And I think that there is a chance that could happen that if we build machines that get control over processes that are crucial for the regulation of life on Earth, and we no longer have agency to influence what's happening there, that this might create large-scale disasters for us.
I don't think that's useful. I think that from a practical perspective, you have to bet always on the timelines in which you are alive. It doesn't make sense to have a financial bet in which you bet that the financial system is going to disappear, right? Because there cannot be any payout for you.
So in principle, you only need to bet on the timelines in which you're still around or people that you matter about or things that you matter about, maybe consciousness on Earth. But there is a deeper issue for me personally, and that is, I don't think that life on Earth is about humans. I don't think it's about human aesthetics.
I don't think it's about Eliezer and his friends, even though I like them. There is something more important happening, and this is complexity on Earth resisting entropy by building structure that develops agency and awareness. And that's, to me, very beautiful. And we are only a very small part of that larger thing.
Showing 361–380 of 510 · page 19 of 26
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