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
Yeah.
Stage six. At some point, you can collapse the division between a personal self and world generator again. And a lot of people get there via meditation, or some of them get there via psychedelics, some of them by accident. And you suddenly notice that you are not actually a person, but you are a vessel that can create a person. And the person is still there.
You observe that personal self, but you observe the personal self from the outside. And you notice it's a representation. And you might also notice that the world that is being created is a representation. If not, then you might experience that I am the universe. I am the thing that is creating everything. And of course, what you're creating is not quantum mechanics and the physical universe.
What you're creating is this game engine that is updating the world, and you're creating your valence, your feelings, and all the people inside of that world, including the person that you identify with yourself in this world.
You noticed how you're generating the game engine. And I mean, when you are dreaming at night, you can, if you have a lucid dream, you can learn how to do this deliberately. And in principle, you can also do it during the day.
And the reason why we don't get to do this from the beginning and why we don't have agency of our feelings right away is because we would game it before they have the necessary amount of wisdom to deal with creating this dream that we are in.
So stage five is already pretty rare. And stage six is even more rare. You basically find this mostly with advanced Buddhist meditators and so on that are dropping into the stage and can induce it at will and spend time in it.
Yes, for instance, could be that is the right thing to do. But it's not that these stages give you scores or levels that you need to advance to. It's not that the next stage is better. You live your life in a mode that works best at any given moment. And when your mind decides that you should have a different configuration, then it's building that configuration.
And for many people, they stay happily at state three and experience themselves as part of groups. And there's nothing wrong with this. And for some people, this doesn't work and they're forced to build more agency over their rational beliefs than this and construct their norms rationally. And so they go to this level. And stage seven is something that is more or less hypothetical.
That would be the stage in which it's basically a transhumanist stage in which you understand how you work, in which the mind fully realizes how it's implemented and can also, in principle, enter different modes in which it could be implemented. And that's the stage that, as far as I understand, is not open to people yet.
Yes, and who knows if there are biological agents that are working at different timescales than us that basically become aware of the way in which they're implemented on ecosystems and can change that implementation and have agency over how they're implemented in the world. And what I find interesting about the discussion about AI alignment, that it seems to be following these stages very much.
Most people seem to be in stage three, also according to Robert Keegan. I think he says that about 85% of people are in stage three and stay there. And if you're in stage three and your opinions are the result of social assimilation, then what you're mostly worried about in the AI is that the AI might have the wrong opinions.
So if the AI says something racist or sexist, we are all lost because we will assimilate the wrong opinions from the AI. And so we need to make sure that the AI has the right opinions and the right values and the right structure. And If you're at stage four, that's not your main concern.
And so most nerds don't really worry about the algorithmic bias and the model that it picks up, because if there's something wrong with this bias, the AI ultimately will prove it. At some point, we'll get it there that it makes mathematical proofs about reality, and then it will figure out what's true and what's false.
But you're still worried that AI might turn you into paperclips because it might have the wrong values, right? So if it's set up with the wrong function that controls its direction in the world, then it might do something that is completely horrible and there's no easy way to fix it.
And if you are at stage five, you're mostly worried that the AI is not going to be enlightened fast enough. Because you realize that the game is not so much about intelligence, but about agency, about the ability to control the future. And the identity is instrumental to this. And if you are a human being, I think at some level you ought to choose your own identity.
You should not have somebody else pick the costume for you and then wear it. But instead, you should be mindful about what you want to be in this world. And I think if you are an agent that is fully malleable, that can provide its own source code, like an AI might do at some point, then the identity that you will have is whatever you can be. And
In this way, the AI will maybe become everything, like a planetary control system. And if it does that, then if we want to coexist with it, it means that it will have to share purposes with us. So it cannot be a transactional relationship. We will not be able to use reinforcement learning with human feedback. to hardwire its values into it.
But what has to happen is probably that it's conscious, so it can relate to our own mode of existence, where an observer is observing itself in real time within certain temporal frames.
And the other thing is that it probably needs to have some kind of transcendental orientation, building shared agency, in the same way as we do when we are able to enter with each other into non-transactional relationships. And I find that something that, because the stage five is so rare, is missing in much of the discourse.
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