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 neurons in this perspective are a specially adapted kind of telegraph cell. that has evolved so we can move our muscles very fast. But our body is, in principle, able to also make models of the world, just much, much slower.
No, I think that there is no gap between the tools of science and telepathy. Either it's there or it's not, and it's an empirical question. And if it's there, we should be able to detect it in a lab.
I don't think that Michael Levin is specifically focused on telepathy very much. He is focused on self-organization in living organisms and in brains, both as a paradigm for development and as a paradigm for information processing.
And when you think about how organization processing works in organisms, there is first of all radical locality, which means everything is decided locally from the perspective of an individual cell. The individual cell is the agent. And the other one is coherence.
Basically, there needs to be some criterion that determines how these cells are interacting in such a way that order emerges on the next level of structure. And this principle of coherence, of imposing constraints that are not validated by the individual parts,
and lead to coherent structure to basically transcend the agency where you form an agent on the next level of organization is crucial in this perspective.
And I think what Mike Levin is looking at is nothing that is outside of the realm of science in any way. It's just that he is a paradigmatic thinker who develops his own paradigm. And most of the neuroscientists are using a different paradigm at this point.
And this often happens in science that a field has a few paradigms in which people try to understand reality and build concepts and make experiments.
Well, why would you want to do that? You see what is working for you and if it's not working for you, you build another structure that works better for you, right? And so I found myself when I was thrown into this world in a state where my intuitions were not working for me. I was not able to
understand how I would be able to survive in this world and build the things that I was interested in, build the kinds of relationship I needed to build, work on the topics that I wanted to make progress on. And so I had to learn. And for me, Twitter is not some tool of publication. It's not something where I put stuff that I entirely believe to be true and provable.
It's an interactive notebook in which I explore possibilities. And I found that when I tried to understand how the mind and how consciousness works, I was quite optimistic. I thought there needs to be a big body of knowledge that I can just study and that works. And so I entered studies in philosophy and computer science. and later psychology and a bit of neuroscience and so on.
And I was disappointed by what I found, because I found that the questions of how consciousness and so on works, how emotion works, how it's possible that the system can experience anything, how motivation emerges in the mind, were not being answered by the authorities that I met and the schools that were around.
And instead, I found that it was individual thinkers that had useful ideas that sometimes were good, sometimes were not so good, sometimes were adopted by a large group of people, sometimes were rejected by large groups of people. But for me, it was much more interesting to see these minds as individuals. And in my perspective, thinking is still something that is done not in groups.
That has to be done by individuals.
I didn't have a choice. I didn't find a group that thought in a way where I felt, okay, I can just adopt everything that everybody thinks here, and now I understand how consciousness works. Or how the mind works, or how thinking works, or what thinking even is, or what feelings are, and how they're implemented, and so on.
To figure all this out, I had to take a lot of ideas from individuals and then try to put them together in something that works for myself.
And on one hand, I think it helps if you try to go down and find first principles on which you can recreate how thinking works, how languages work, what representation is, whether representation is necessary, how the relationship between a representing agent and the world works in general.
I don't feel pressure from the crowd. I'm completely immune to that. In the same sense, I don't have respect for authority. I have respect for what an individual is accomplishing or have respect for mental firepower. But it's not that I meet somebody and get slack-jawed and unable to speak.
Or when a large group of people has a certain idea that is different from mine, I don't necessarily feel intimidated, which has often been a problem for me in my life because I lack instincts that other people develop at a very young age and that help with their self-preservation in a social environment. So I had to learn a lot of things the hard way.
Well, it's a very basic question when you read a theory that you find convincing or interesting. How do you know? It's very interesting to figure out what are the sources of that other person, not which authority can they refer to that is then taking off the burden of being truthful. But how did this authority in turn know? What is the epistemic chain to observables?
Showing 161–180 of 510 · page 9 of 26
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