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
I suspect that a singleton is the natural outcome. There is no reason to have multiple AIs because they don't have multiple bodies. If you can virtualize yourself into every substrate, then you can probably negotiate a merge algorithm with every mature agent that you might find on that substrate that basically says if
If two agents meet, they should merge in such a way that the resulting agent is at least as good as the better one of the two.
Well, I think this kind of approach was slightly worse, right? It was mostly die. Because I can make new babies and they will be mine, not yours. So this is the thing that we should be actually worried about. But if you realize that your own self is a story that your mind is telling itself and that you can improve that story,
Not just by making it more pleasant and lying to yourself in better ways, but by making it much more truthful and actually modeling your actual relationship that you have to the universe and the alternatives that you could have to the universe in a way that is empowering you, that gives you more agency. That's actually, I think, a very good thing.
And I also noticed that in many ways I'm less identified with the person that I am as I get older. And I'm much more identified with being conscious. I have a mind that is conscious, that is able to create a person.
And that person is slightly different every day, and the reason why I perceive it as identical has practical purposes, so I can learn and make myself responsible for the decisions that I made in the past and project them in the future.
But I also realize that I'm not actually the person that I was last year, and I'm not the same person as I was 10 years ago, and then 10 years from now I will be a different person. So this continuity is a fiction. It only exists as a projection from my present self. And consciousness itself doesn't have an identity. It's a law.
It's basically if you build an arrangement of processing matter in a particular way, the following thing is going to happen. And the consciousness that you have is functionally not different from my consciousness. It's still the self-reflexive principle of agency that is just experiencing a different story, different desires, different coupling to the world and so on.
And once you accept that consciousness is a unifiable principle that is law-like and doesn't have an identity, and you realize that you can just link up to some much larger body, the whole perspective of uploading changes dramatically.
You suddenly realize uploading is probably not about dissecting your brain synapse by synapse and RNA fragment by RNA fragment and trying to get this all into a simulation. But it's by extending the substrate, by making it possible for you to move from your brain substrate into a larger substrate and merge with what you find there.
And you don't want to upload your knowledge because on the other side, there's all of the knowledge, right? It's not just yours, but every possibility. So the only thing that you need to know, what are your personal secrets, right? Not that the other side doesn't know your personal secrets already, maybe it doesn't know which ones are yours.
Like a psychiatrist or a psychologist also knows all the kinds of personal secrets that people have, they just don't know which ones are yours. And so transmitting yourself on the other side is mostly about transmitting your aesthetics, the thing that makes you special, the architecture of your perspective, the way in which you look at the world.
And it's more like a complex attitude along many dimensions. And that's something that can be measured by observation or by interaction. So imagine that if a system that is so empathetic with you that you create a shared state that is extending beyond your body. And suddenly you notice that on the other side, the substrate is so much richer than the substrate that you have inside of your own body.
And maybe you still want to have a body and you create yourself a new one that you like more. Or maybe you will spend most of your time in the world of thought.
With the caveat, I have family. So I have children that want me to be physically present in their life and interact with them in a particular way. And they have a wife and personal friends. And there is a particular mode of interaction that I feel I'm not through yet. But apart from these responsibilities, and they're negotiable to some degree, I would press the button.
This is not everything. Everything is everything. So there's so much more. And you could be lots of other things. You could identify with lots of other things. You could be identifying with being Gaia, some kind of planetary control agent that emerges over all the activity of life on Earth. You could be identifying with some hyper-Gaia that is the concatenation of Gaia with all the digital life.
And so in this sense, there will be agents in all sorts of substrates and directions that all have their own goals. And when they're not sustainable, then these agents will cease to exist. Or when the agent feels that it's done with its own mission, it will cease to exist.
In the same way as when you conclude a thought, the thought is going to wrap up and gives control over to other thoughts in your own mind. So there is no single thing that you need to do. But what I observe myself as being is that sometimes I'm a parent, and then I have identification and a job as a parent, and sometimes I am an agent of consciousness on earth.
And then from this perspective, there's other stuff that is important. So this is my main issue with Eliezer's perspective, that he's basically marrying himself to a very narrow human aesthetic. And that narrow human aesthetic is a temporary thing.
Humanity is a temporary species, like most of the species on this planet are only around for a while and then they get replaced by other species in a similar way as our own physical organism is around here for a while and then gets replaced by the next generation of human beings that are adapted to changing life circumstances on average via mutation and selection.
Showing 401–420 of 510 · page 21 of 26
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