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
And I think that we need, in some sense, focus on how to formalize love, how to understand love, and how to build it into the machines that we are currently building and that are about to become smarter than us.
The neuroscientist Grossberg has come up with the cognitive architecture that he calls the adaptive resonance theory. And his perspective is that our neurons can be understood as oscillators that are resonating with each other and with outside phenomena. So the coarse-grained model of the universe that we are building in some sense is a resonance with objects outside of us in the world.
So basically we take up patterns of the universe that we are coupled with and our brain is not so much
understood as circuitry, even though this perspective is valid, but it's almost an ether in which the individual neurons are passing on chemoelectrical signals or arbitrary signals across all modalities that can be transmitted between cells, simulate each other in this way, and produce patterns that they modulate while passing them on.
And this speed of signal progression in the brain is roughly at the speed of sound, incidentally, because the time that it takes for the signals to hop from cell to cell, which means it's relatively slow with respect to the world. It takes an appreciable fraction of a second for a signal to go through the entire neocortex, something like a few hundred milliseconds.
And so there's a lot of stuff happening in that time where the signal is passing through your brain, including in the brain itself. So nothing in the brain is assuming that stuff happens simultaneously. Everything in the brain is working in a paradigm where the world has already moved on when you are ready to do the next thing to your signal. including the signal processing system itself.
It's quite a different paradigm than the one in our digital computers, where we currently assume that your GPU or CPU is pretty much globally in the same state.
There is a state in which you notice that you are no longer a person and instead you are one with the universe.
Yes, but this one with the universe is of course not accurately modeling that you are indeed some God entity or indeed the universe becoming aware of itself, even though you get this experience. I believe that you get this experience because your mind is modeling the fact that you are no longer identified with the personal self in that state.
but you have transcended this division between the self model and the world model. And you're experiencing yourself as your mind, as something that is representing a universe.
Yes. So it's inside of the model still. You're still inside of patterns that are generated in your brain and in your organism. And what you are now experiencing is that you're no longer this personal self in there, but you are the entirety of the mind and its contents.
A lot of people who get into the state think this is associated with enlightenment. I suspect it's a favorite training goal for a number of meditators. But I think that enlightenment is in some sense more mundane. And it's a step further or sideways. It's the state where you realize that everything is a representation.
Yes. Basically, you notice at some point that your qualia can be deconstructed.
You can start with looking at a face. Maybe look at your own face in a mirror. Look at your face for a few hours in a mirror or for a few minutes. At some point, it will look very weird because you notice that there's actually no face. You basically start unseeing the face. What you see is the geometry.
And then you can disassemble the geometry and realize how that geometry is being constructed in your mind. and you can learn to modify this. So basically you can change these generators in your own mind to shift the face around or to change the construction of the face, to change the way in which the features are being assembled.
Yeah, that is probably what you shouldn't be doing, right? Because outside of your personal self, this outer mind is probably a relatively smart agent. And what you often notice is that you have thoughts about how you should live, but you observe yourself doing different things and have different feelings.
And that's because your outer mind doesn't believe you and doesn't believe your rational thoughts.
The thing is that the outer mind is usually smarter than you are. Rational thinking is very brittle. It's very hard to use logic and symbolic thinking to have an accurate model of the world. So there is often an underlying system that is looking at your rational thoughts and then tells you, no, you're still missing something. your gut feeling is still facing something else.
And this can be, for instance, you find a partner that looks perfect or you find a deal and you build a company or whatever that looks perfect to you. And yet at some level, you feel something is off and you cannot put your finger on it. And the more you reason about it, the better it looks to you. But the system that is outside still tells you, no, no, you're missing something.
People call this intuition, right? Intuition is this unreflected part of your attitude composition and computation where you produce a model of how you relate to the world and what you need to do in it and what you can do in it and what's going to happen that is usually deeper and often more accurate than your reason.
Showing 121–140 of 510 · page 7 of 26
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