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 mean, at some level, you're always thinking, you are constructing things. And I believe that this ability to reason about your mental representation is what we mean by thinking. It's an intrinsically reflexive process that requires consciousness. Without consciousness, you cannot think. You can generate the content of feelings and so on outside of consciousness.
It's very hard to be conscious of how your feelings emerge, at least in the early stages of development. But thoughts is something that you always control. And if you are a nerd like me, You often have to skip stage three because you lack the intuitive empathy with others. Because in order to resonate with a group, you need to have a quite similar architecture.
And if people are wired differently, then it's hard for them to resonate with other people and basically have empathy. Empathy, which is not the same as compassion, but it is a shared perceptual mental state. Empathy happens not just via inference about the mental states of others, but it's a perception of what other people feel and where they're at.
I think, yes, but I experienced that too. But you need to build something that is like a meta-architecture. You need to be able to embrace the architecture of the other to some degree or find some shared common ground. And it's also this issue that if you are inert, normally often neurotypical people have difficulty to resonate with you.
And as a result, they have difficulty understanding you unless they have enough wisdom to feel what's going on there.
My experience as a child growing up was that I did not find any way to interface with the stage three people. And they didn't do that with me. So it took me- Did you try? Yeah, of course. I tried it very hard. But it was only when I entered a mathematics school at ninth grade, lots of other nerds were present.
that I found people that I could deeply resonate with and had the impression that, yes, I have friends now, I found my own people. And before that, I felt extremely lonely in the world. There was basically nobody I could connect to.
I remember there was one moment in all these years where I was in, there was a school exchange and it was a Russian boy, kid from the Russian garrison stationed in Eastern Germany who visited our school. And we played a game of chess against each other. And we looked into each other's eyes and we sat there for two hours playing this game of chess. And I had the impression, this is a human being.
He understands what I understand. We didn't even speak the same language.
It was not my main concern. My main concern was mostly that I was alone. It was not so much the question, is it okay to be the way I am? I couldn't do much about it, so I had to deal with it. But my main issue was that I was not sure if I would ever meet anybody growing up that I would connect to at such a deep level that I would feel that I could belong.
Yes. And I noticed the same thing when I came into the math school, that I think at least half, probably two-thirds of these kids were severely traumatized as children growing up, and in large part due to being alone, because they couldn't find anybody to relate to.
No.
I'm not alone anymore. It took me some time to update and to get over the trauma and so on, but I felt that in my twenties, I had lots of friends and I had my place in the world and I had no longer doubts that I would never be alone again.
No. Sorry.
So we were at stage four. And so basically I find that many nerds jump straight into stage four, bypassing stage three.
Yeah, of course. Sometimes they do, not always. The question is basically, do you stay a little bit autistic or do you catch up? And I believe you can catch up. You can build this missing structure. And basically,
basically experience yourself as part of a group learn intuitive empathy and develop the sense this percept perceptual sense of feeling what other people feel and before that i could only basically feel this when i was deeply in love with somebody and succinct or so there's a lot of friction to feeling that way like it take to only with certain people as opposed to it comes naturally yeah it's frictionless but um this is something that basically later i felt started to resolve itself for me to a large degree what was the trick
In many ways, growing up and paying attention. Meditation did help. I had some very crucial experiences in getting close to people, building connections, cuddling a lot in my student years.
loving other people and being loved by other people and building a space in which you can be safe and can experiment and touch a lot and be close to somebody a lot. And over time, basically at some point you realize, oh, it's no longer... that I feel locked out, but I feel connected and I experience where somebody else is at.
And normally my mind is racing very fast at a high frequency, so it's not always working like this. Sometimes it works better, sometimes it works less. But I also don't see this as a pressure. It's interesting to observe myself, which frequency I'm at and at which mode somebody else is at.
Showing 61–80 of 510 · page 4 of 26
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