#053 - Joscha Bach on Modeling Reality & Self-Organizing Software

Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist and AI researcher. We talk about our relationship with & models of reality, creativity and curiosity, animism and self-organizing software, stages of development, and more. — (01:25) The dream world; how we interact with & perceive reality (03:49) Fear (05:16) Self, consciousness, & awareness (08:10) We're a coarse pattern on top of base reality (11:13) Presence & perceptual windows (12:16) Is this model mechanistic & reductionist? (13:50) Life exists to minimize free energy (16:47) What makes us different from other sentient beings & structures (20:35) Creativity: self-transformative exploration (23:40) Curiosity as uncertainty reduction (29:20) Exploration vs. exploitation (32:45) Combating social norms & conditioning; being a nerd (35:18) Knowing which models to update (37:56) Being a creator; being able to build & maintain (43:21) Everything can be understood (44:13) Animism; everything is self-organizing “software” (48:48) Natural vs. human-created “software” (50:57) AGI vs. natural intelligence (55:15) Limited by the locality of our sensory inputs (56:33) Stages of lucidity & development (01:03:35) Convergence of global traditions (01:09:40) Issue with Buddhism (01:14:16) Where does the animism and software arise from? (01:17:58) Building a coherent world, together — Joscha’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/Plinz Joscha's Substack: https://joscha.substack.com/ Personal Site: http://bach.ai/ Spencer’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/SP1NS1R Spencer’s Blog: https://spencerkier.substack.com