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
So first of all, panpsychism is the perspective that consciousness is inseparable from matter in the universe. And I find panpsychism quite unsatisfying because it does not explain consciousness. It does not explain how this aspect of matter produces it.
It's also when I try to formalize panpsychism and write down what it actually means with a more formal mathematical language, it's very difficult to distinguish it from reality. saying that there is a software side to the world in the same way as there is a software side to what the transistors are doing in your computer.
So basically there is a pattern at a certain core screening of the universe that in some reasons of the universe leads to observers that are observing themselves. So panpsychism maybe is not even when I write it down a position that is distinct from functionalism. But intuitively, a lot of people feel that the activity of matter itself, of mechanisms in the world, is insufficient to explain it.
So it's something that needs to be intrinsic to matter itself. And you can, apart from this abstract idea, have an experience in which you...
experience yourself as being the universe which i suspect is basically happening because you manage to dissolve the division between personal self and mind that you establish as an infant when you construct a personal self and transcend it again and understand how it works but there is something deeper that is that you feel that you're also sharing a state with other people that you um
have an experience in which you notice that your personal self is moving into everything else, that you basically look out of the eyes of another person, that every agent in the world that is an observer is in some sense you. And we forget that we are the same agent.
For me, that's a question that I don't really know the answer to. In Turing's famous 1950 paper in which he describes the Turing test, he does speculate about telepathy, interestingly, and asks himself if telepathy is real, and he thinks that it very well might be.
what would be the implication for AI systems that try to be intelligent, because he didn't see a mechanism by which a computer program would become telepathic. And I suspect if telepathy would exist, or if all the reports that you get from people when you ask the normal person on the street
I find that very often they say, I have experiences with telepathy, the scientists might not be interested in this and might not have a theory about this, but I have difficulty explaining it away. And so you could say maybe this is a superstition, maybe it's a false memory, or maybe it's a little bit of psychosis, who knows?
Maybe somebody wants to make their own life more interesting or misremember something. But a lot of people report I noticed something terrible happened to my partner and I know this is exactly the moment it happened where my child had an accident and I knew that was happening and the child was in a different town.
So maybe it's a false memory where this is later on mistakenly attributed, but a lot of people think that this is not the correct explanation. So if something like this was real, what would it mean?
It probably would mean that either your body is an antenna that is sending information over all sorts of channels, like maybe just electromagnetic radio signals that you're sending over long distances, and you get attuned to another person that you spend enough time with to get a few bits out of the ether to figure out what this person is doing.
Or maybe it's also when you are very close to somebody and you become empathetic with them. What happens is that you go into a resonance state with them, right? Similar to when people go into a seance and they go into a trance state and they start shifting a video board around on the table.
I think what happens is that their minds go by their nervous systems into a resonance state in which they basically create something like a shared dream between them.
With physical closeness, it's much easier to experience empathy with someone, right? I suspect it would be difficult for me to have empathy for you if you were in a different town also. How would that work? But if you are very close to someone, you'd pick up all sorts of signals from their body, not just via your eyes, but with your entire body.
And if the nervous system sits on the other side and the intercellular communication sits on the other side and is integrating over all these signals, you can make inferences about the state of the other. And it's not just the personal self that does this via reasoning, but your perceptual system. And what basically happens is that your representations are directly interacting.
The physical resonant models of the universe that exist in your nervous system and in your body might go into resonance with others and start sharing some of their states. So you basically, by being next to somebody, you pick up some of their vibes and feel without looking at them what they're feeling in this moment.
And it's difficult for you, if you're very empathetic, to detach yourself from it and have an emotional state that is completely independent from your environment. People who are highly empathetic are describing this. And now imagine that a lot of organisms on this planet have representations of the environment and operate like this, and they are adjacent to each other and overlapping.
So there's going to be some degree in which there is basically some chained interaction, and we are forming some slightly shared representation. And relatively few neuroscientists who consider this possibility. I think a big rarity in this regard is Michael Levin, who is considering these things in earnest. And I stumbled on this train of thought mostly by noticing that
The tasks of a neuron can be fulfilled by other cells as well. They can send different types of chemical messages and physical messages to their adjacent cells and learn when to do this and when not, make this conditional and become universal function approximators. The only thing that they cannot do is telegraph information over axons very quickly over long distances.
Showing 141–160 of 510 · page 8 of 26
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