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
That you will predict and you will do it with facts that I can communicate to another human in kind of this compact fits on an index card.
That's almost understand.
And so I think these machines let us predict.
They let us control.
We have to derive our own understanding at this moment, right?
We can experiment now on the artifact.
We can look at the 200 million predicted structures, not just the 200,000 experimental structures in order to help us understand.
But it doesn't do the act of understanding for us.
This model is derived from a concept by the psychologist Robert Keegan, and he talks about the development of the self as a process that happens in principle by some kind of reverse engineering of the mind, where you gradually become aware of yourself and thereby build structure that allows you to interact deeper with the world and yourself.
And I found myself using this model not so much as a developmental model. I'm not even sure if it's a very good developmental model because I saw my children not progressing exactly like that. And I also suspect that you don't go through the stages necessarily in succession. And it's not that you work through one stage and then you get into the next one. Sometimes you revisit them.
Sometimes stuff is happening in parallel. But it's, I think, a useful framework to look at what's present in the structure of a person and how they interact with the world and how they relate to themselves. So it's more like a philosophical framework that allows you to talk about how minds work. And at first, when we are born, we don't have a personal self yet, I think.
Instead, we have an attentional self. And this attentional self is initially in the infant tasked with building a world model and also an initial model of the self. But mostly it's building a game engine in the brain that is tracking sensory data and uses it to explain it. And in some sense, you could compare it to a game engine like Minecraft or so, so it colors and sounds differently.
People are all not physical objects. They are creation of our mind at a certain level of core screening. Models that are mathematical, that use geometry and that use manipulation of objects and so on to create scenes in which we can find ourselves and interact with them.
Yeah. And this personal self is something that is more or less created after the world is finished, after it's trained into the system, after it has been constructed. And this personal self is an agent that interacts with the outside world. And the outside world is not the world of quantum mechanics, not the physical universe, but it's the model that has been generated in our own mind.
And this is us. And we experience ourselves interacting with that outside world that is created outside of our own mind. Outside of ourselves, there are feelings, and they present our interface to this outside world. They pose problems to us.
These feelings are basically attitudes that our mind is computing that tell us what's needed in the world, the things that we are drawn to, the things that we are afraid of. And we are tasked with solving this problem of satisfying the needs, avoiding the aversions, following on our inner commitments and so on, and also modeling ourselves and building the next stage.
So after we have this personal self in stage two online, many people form a social self. And this social self allows the individual to experience themselves as part of a group. It's basically this thing that when you are playing in a team, for instance, you don't notice yourself just as a single note that is reaching out into the world, but you're also looking down.
You're looking down from this entire group and you see how this group is looking at this individual. And everybody in the group is, in some sense, emulating this group spirit to some degree. And in this state, people are forming their opinions by assimilating them from this group mind. They basically gain the ability to act a little bit like a hive mind.
Yeah, it's basically the way in which people do it in this stage is that they experience what are the opinions of my environment. They experience the relationship that I have to their environment and they resonate with people around them and get more opinions through this interaction, through the way in which they relate to others.
And at stage four, you basically understand that stuff is true and false independently of what other people believe. And you have agency over your own beliefs in that stage. You basically discover epistemology, the rules about determining what's true and false.
Showing 41–60 of 510 · page 3 of 26
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