Lex Fridman PodcastJoscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality | Lex Fridman Podcast #101
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,093 words- 0:00 – 3:14
Introduction
- LFLex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Joscha Bach, VP of research at the AI Foundation, with a history of research positions at MIT and Harvard. Joscha is one of the most unique and brilliant people in the artificial intelligence community, exploring the workings of the human mind, intelligence, consciousness, life on Earth, and the possibly simulated fabric of our universe. I can see myself talking to Joscha many times in the future. Quick summary of the ads. Two sponsors, ExpressVPN and Cash App. Please consider supporting the podcast by signing up at expressvpn.com/lexpod and downloading Cash App and using code LEXPODCAST. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter @LexFridman. Since this comes up more often than I ever would have imagined, I challenge you to try to figure out how to spell my last name without using the letter E. An- and it'll probably be the correct way. (laughs) As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Get it at expressvpn.com/lexpod to support this podcast and to get an extra three months free on a one-year package. I've been using ExpressVPN for many years. I love it. I think ExpressVPN is the best VPN out there. They told me to say it, but I think it actually happens to be true. It doesn't log your data, it's crazy fast, and it's easy to use. Literally, just one big power on button. Again, for obvious reasons, it's really important that they don't log your data. It works on Linux and everywhere else too. Shout out to my favorite flavor of Linux, Ubuntu Mate 2004. Once again, get it at expressvpn.com/lexpod to support this podcast and to get a extra three months free on a one-year package. This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code LEXPODCAST. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App does fractional share trading, let me mention that the order execution algorithm that works behind the scenes to create the abstraction of the fractional orders is an algorithmic marvel. So big props to the Cash App engineers for taking a step up to the next layer of abstraction over the stock market, making trading more accessible for new investors and diversification much easier. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play and use the code LEXPODCAST, you get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Joscha Bach.
- 3:14 – 10:38
Reverse engineering Joscha Bach
- LFLex Fridman
As you've said, you grew up in a forest in East Germany, just as we were talking about off mic, to parents who are artists. And now I think, at least to me, you've become one of the most unique thinkers in the AI world. So can we try to reverse engineer your mind a little bit? What were the key philosopher's, scientist ideas, maybe even movies or just realizations that had a impact on you when you were growing up that kind of led to the trajectory or were the key sort of crossroads in the trajectory of your intellectual development?
- JBJoscha Bach
My father, uh, came from a long tradition of architects, a distant, uh, branch of the Bach family, and, um, so basically he was technically a nerd, and nerds need to interface in society with nonstandard ways. Sometimes I define a nerd as somebody who thinks that the purpose of communication is to submit your ideas to peer review, and, um, normal people understand that the primary purpose of communication is to negotiate alignment, and these purposes tend to conflict, which means that nerds have to learn how to interact with society at large.
- LFLex Fridman
Who is the reviewer in, uh, the nerd's view of communication?
- JBJoscha Bach
Everybody who you consider to be a peer. So whatever hapless individual is to, uh, around, well, you would try to make him or her the gift of information. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) Okay. So you're... Now, by the way, my research w- uh, malinformed me. So you're w- architect or artist? Or do you see those two as the same?
- JBJoscha Bach
Um, uh, so he, he did study architecture, but, um, basically my grandfather made the wrong decision. He married an aristocrat and, uh, was drawn into, into the war, and, uh, he came back after 15 years. So basically, my father, uh, was not, um, parented by a nerd but, but by somebody who tried to tell him what to do and expected him to do what he was told.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
And he was unable to. He's unable to, uh, do things if he's not intrinsically motivated. So in some sense, my grandmother broke her son, and her son responded by, um, when he became an architect, to become an artist. So he built Hundertwasser architecture. He built houses without right angles. He built lots of things that didn't work in the more brutalist traditions of Eastern Germany. And so he, uh, bought an old water mill, moved out to the countryside, and did only what he wanted to do, which was art. Eastern Germany was perfect for Boheme because, um, you had complete material safety. Food was heavily subsidized. Healthcare was free. You didn't have to worry about rent or pensions or anything. So-
- LFLex Fridman
So it's the socialized communist side of Germany.
- JBJoscha Bach
Yes. And the other thing is, uh, it was almost impossible not to be in political disagreement with your government, which is very productive for artists. So everything that you do is intrinsically meaningful because it will always touch on the deeper currents of society, of culture and be in conflict with it and tension with it, and you will always have to define yourself with respect to this.
- LFLex Fridman
So what impact did your father, this-... outside the bo- uh, outside of the box thinker against the government, against the world artists have (overlapping 00:00:09) an impact on your life.
- JBJoscha Bach
He was actually not a thinker. He was somebody who only got self-aware to the degree that he needed to make himself functional.
- LFLex Fridman
I see.
- JBJoscha Bach
So in some sense, he's- he was also in- uh, late 1960s and, um, he was in some sense a hippie, so he became a one-person cult. He lived out there in his kingdom. He built big sculpture gardens and, um, in- started many avenues of art and so on, and convinced a, um, woman to live with him. She was also an architect, and she adored him and decided to share her life with him. And I basically grew up in a big cave full of books. I'm almost feral. And I was bored out there. It was very, very beautiful, very quiet, and quite lonely. So I started to read. And by the time I came to school, I've read everything until fourth grade and then some. And there was not a real way for me to relate to the outside world. And I couldn't quite put my finger on why, and today I know it was because I was a nerd obviously, and I was the only nerd around so there w- was- were no other kids like me. And there was nobody interested in physics or computing or mathematics and so on. And, um, this village school that I went to, it was basically a nice school, um, kids were nice to me, I was not beaten up, but I also didn't make many friends or build deep relationships. That only happened in- starting from ninth grade when I went to- to a school for mathematics and physics.
- LFLex Fridman
Do you remember any key books from this moment that like-
- JBJoscha Bach
Yes, yes, I basically read everything. So-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- JBJoscha Bach
... uh, I went to the library and I worked my way through the, uh, children's and young adult sections, and then I read a lot of, uh, science fiction, for instance, Stanislaw Lem, um, basically the great author of Cybernetics, has influenced me. Back then, I didn't see him as a big influence because everything that he wrote seemed to be so natural to me. It's only later that I contrasted it with what other people wrote. Uh, another thing that was very influential on me were the classical philosophers and, um, also the of romanticism, so German poetry and art, um, Drost-Hülshoff and Heine and, um, up to Hesse and so on. And-
- LFLex Fridman
Hesse, I love Hesse. So at which point do the classical philosophers end? At this point, we're in the 21st century, what's- what's the latest classical philosopher? Does this stretch through even as far as Nietzsche, or is this- are we talking about Plato and Aristotle and-
- JBJoscha Bach
I think that Nietzsche is the classical equivalent of a shit poster.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- JBJoscha Bach
So, uh, he's very smart and easy to read-
- LFLex Fridman
So he's a- yeah, classical troll. Okay.
- JBJoscha Bach
... and, yeah, but he's not so much trolling others, he's trolling himself because he was at odds with the world. Largely his romantic relationships didn't work out, he got angry, and he basically became an nihilist. And, um-
- LFLex Fridman
Isn't that a- isn't that a beautiful way to be as an intellectual, is to constantly be trolling yourself, to be in that conflict, in- in that... no? (laughs) In that- in that tension?
- JBJoscha Bach
No, I think it's a lack of self-awareness. At some point, you have to understand the comedy of your own situation. If you take yourself seriously, uh, and- and you are not functional, it ends in tragedy as it did for Nietzsche.
- LFLex Fridman
I think- you think he took himself too seriously in that- in that tension.
- JBJoscha Bach
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
So to be able to laugh at yourself-
- JBJoscha Bach
And as you find the same thing in- in Hesse and so on, this Steppenwolf syndrome is classic adolescence where you basically feel misunderstood by the world and you don't understand that all the misunderstandings are the result of your own lack of self-awareness because you think that you are a prototypical human and the others around you should behave the same way as you expect them based on your innate instincts and it doesn't work out, and you become a transcendentalist to, uh, deal with that. And, uh, so it's very, very understandable and have great sympathies for this, to the degree that I can have sympathy for my own intellectual history. But, uh, you have to grow out of it. (laughs)
- 10:38 – 18:47
Nature of truth
- LFLex Fridman
people like Ayn Rand believed sort of an idea of there's objective truth? So do you- what's your sense in the philosophical... w- if you remove yourself as objective from the picture, you think it's possible to actually discover ideas that are true or are we just in a mesh of relative concepts that are neither true nor false, it's just a giant mess?
- JBJoscha Bach
You cannot define, uh, objective truth without understanding the nature of truth in the first place. So what does the brain mean by saying that discover something is truth? So for instance, uh, a model can be predictive or not predictive.
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- JBJoscha Bach
Um, then there can be a sense in which a mathematical statement can be true because it's defined as true under certain conditions. So it's basically a particular state that, uh, a variable can have an assembled game. And then, uh, you can have a correspondence between systems and talk about truths, which is again, a type of model correspondence. And there also seems to be a particular kind of ground truths. So for instance, we are confronted with the enormity of something existing at all, right? That's-
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- JBJoscha Bach
... stunning when you realize something exists rather than nothing. And this seems to be true, right? There is some abs- absolute truth in- in the fact that something seems to be happening.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, that sh- that- that to me is a showstopper. I can just think about that idea and be amazed by that idea for the rest of my life and not go any farther 'cause I don't even know the answer to that. Why does anything exist at all?
- JBJoscha Bach
Well, the easiest answer is existence is the default, right? So this is the lowest number of bits that you would need to encode this.
- LFLex Fridman
Whose answer... who provides that?
- JBJoscha Bach
The simplest answer-
- LFLex Fridman
The simplest answer.
- JBJoscha Bach
... to this is that existence is the default. So-
- LFLex Fridman
What about non-existence? I mean, that seems... (laughs)
- JBJoscha Bach
Non-existence might not be a meaningful notion in this sense. So in some sense if everything that can exist exists, for something to exist it probably needs to be implementable. The e- and only thing that can be implemented is finite automata, so maybe the whole of existence is a superposition of all finite automata and we are in some region of the fractal that has the properties that it can contain us.
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, what does it mean to be a superposition of- of finite auto- so I under- uh...... super position of all pos- like, all possible rules.
- JBJoscha Bach
Imagine that every automaton is basically an operator-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
... that acts on some substrate and as a result you get emergent patterns.
- LFLex Fridman
What's a substrate?
- JBJoscha Bach
Um-
- LFLex Fridman
What's a substrate?
- JBJoscha Bach
... I have no idea to know, so it's basic-
- LFLex Fridman
What's... Some substrate.
- JBJoscha Bach
It's some s- something that can, uh, store information.
- LFLex Fridman
Something that can store information, there's an automaton op- operator.
- JBJoscha Bach
Something that can hold state.
- LFLex Fridman
Still, doesn't make sense to me the why that exists at all. I could just sit there with a, with a beer or a, or a vodka and just enjoy the fact, pondering the why.
- JBJoscha Bach
May not have a why. The- this might be the- the wrong direction to ask-
- LFLex Fridman
It is.
- JBJoscha Bach
... into this. So there could be no relation in- in the why direction without asking for a purpose or for a cause. It doesn't mean that everything has to have a purpose or a cause, right?
- 18:47 – 23:14
Original thinking
- JBJoscha Bach
- LFLex Fridman
That's kind of interesting. Do you think of computation and computer science, and you kind of represent that to me as maybe that's the modern day... you in a sense are the new philosopher by sort of the computer scientist-... who dares to ask the bigger questions that philosophy originally started is the new philos- is the new philosopher.
- JBJoscha Bach
Certainly not me, I think. I'm mostly still this child that g- grows up in a very beautiful valley and looks at the world from the outside and tries to understand what's going on. And my teachers tell me things, and they largely don't make sense.
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- JBJoscha Bach
So, I have to make my own models. So, I have to f- discover the foundations of what the others are saying. I have to try to fix them, have to be charitable. I try to understand what they must have, uh, thought originally or what their teachers or their teachers' teachers must have thought until everything got lost in translation, and how to make sense of the reality that we are in. And whenever I have an original idea, I'm usually late to the party by, say, 400 years. And the only thing that's good is that the parties get smaller and smaller the older I get and the more I explore. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) The par- the parties get smaller?
- JBJoscha Bach
And more exclusive. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
And more exclusive.
- JBJoscha Bach
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
So, uh, I- it seems like one of the key qualities of your upbringing was that you were not tethered, whether it's because your parents or in general, maybe your, something within your, within your mind, some genetic m- material, that you were not tethered to the ideas of the general populous.
- JBJoscha Bach
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Which is actually a unique property. We're kind of, uh, thr- you know, the education system and whatever from... Not education system, just existing in this world forces certain sets of ideas onto you. Can you, uh, disentangle that? Why were you, why are you not so tethered? Even in your work today, you seem to not care about perhaps, uh, a best paper in Europe's, right? Being tethered to particular, uh, things that current, today, in this year, people seem to value as a thing you put on your CV and resume. You're a little bit more outside of that world, outside of the world of ideas that people are especially focused in, the benchmarks of today, the things. What's, can you disentangle that? 'Cause I think that's inspiring, and if there were more people like that, we might be able to solve some of the bigger problems that sort of AI dreams to solve.
- JBJoscha Bach
Um, there's a big danger in this because in a way, you are expected to marry into an intellectual tradition and within this tradition, into a particular school. If everybody comes up with their own paradigms, the whole thing is not communicative as an enterprise.
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- JBJoscha Bach
Right? So, in some sense, you need a healthy balance. You need paradigmatic thinkers and you need people that work within given paradigms. Basically, scientists today define themselves largely by methods, and it's almost a disease that we think as a scientist that somebody who was, uh, con- convinced by their guidance counselor that they should, uh, join a particular discipline, and then they find a good mentor-
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- JBJoscha Bach
... to learn the right methods, and then they're lucky enough, uh, and privileged enough to join the right team, and then they will, their name will show up on influential papers. But we also see that there are diminishing returns with this approach. And when our field, computer science, uh, and AI started, uh, most of the people that joined this field had interesting opinions. And today's thinkers in AI either don't have interesting opinions at all or these opinions are inconsequential for what they're actually doing, because what they're doing is they apply the state-of-the-art methods with a small epsilon. And, uh-
- LFLex Fridman
I see.
- JBJoscha Bach
This is, um, often a good idea if, if you f- think that this is the best way to make progress. And for me, it's, uh, first of all, very boring. If somebody else can do it, why should I do it? Right?
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- JBJoscha Bach
So, uh, if the, if the current methods of machine learning lead to s- uh, strong AI, why should I be doing it, right? I will just wait until they're done and wait until they do this on the beach or read interesting books or write some and have fun. But, uh, if you don't think that we are currently doing the right thing-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JBJoscha Bach
... if we are missing, um, some perspectives, then it's required to think outside of the box. It's also required to understand the boxes. But it's, it's necessary to understand what worked and what didn't work and for what reasons. So, you have to be willing to ask new questions and design new methods whenever you want to answer them, and you have to be willing to dismiss the existing methods if you think that they're not going to yield the right answers. It's very bad career advice to do that.
- 23:14 – 31:45
Sentience vs intelligence
- JBJoscha Bach
- LFLex Fridman
So, maybe to briefly stay for one more time in the, the early days, when would you say for you was the dream, before we dive into the discussions, uh, that we just almost started, uh, when was the dream to understand or maybe to create human level intelligence born for you?
- JBJoscha Bach
I think that you, uh, can see AI largely today as, um, advanced, um, information processing. If you would change the acronym of AI into that, most people in the field would be happy.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
It would not change anything what they're doing. We're automating statistics and, uh, many of the statistical models are more advanced than what statisticians had in the past, and it's pretty good work. It's very productive. And the, the other aspect of AI is, is philosophical project, and this philosophical project is very risky and, uh, very few people work on it, and it's not clear if it succeeds.
- LFLex Fridman
So, first of all, let's, this is, you, you, you keep throwing, uh, sort of a lot of really interesting ideas and I have to pick which ones we go with.
- JBJoscha Bach
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
But, uh, sort of, uh, first of all, you use the term information processing, just information processing, as if it's, um, it's the mere, it's the muck of existence, as if it's the epitome of, of ex- like, the, that, that the entirety of the universe might be information processing-
- JBJoscha Bach
Yes.
- LFLex Fridman
... that consciousness and intelligence might be an information problem. So, that, maybe you can comment on if that's, if the advanced information processing is, uh, is a limiting kind of, uh, realm of ideas. And then the other one is, what do you mean by the philosophical project?
- JBJoscha Bach
So, um, I suspect that general intelligence is the...... result of trying to solve general problems. So, uh, intelligence, I think, is the ability to model. It's not necessarily goal-directed rationality or something. Many intelligent people are bad at this. But, uh, it's the ability to be presented with a number of patterns and see a structure in those patterns and be able to predict the next set of patterns, right? To, to make sense of things. And, uh, some problems are very general. Usually intelligence serves control, so you make these models for a particular purpose of interacting as an agent with the world and getting certain results. But it's, um, the intelligence itself is, in a sense, instrumental to something. But by itself, it's just the ability to make models. And some of the problems are so general that the system that makes them needs to understand what itself is and how it relates to the environment. So as a child, for instance, you notice you do certain things despite y- you perceiving yourself as wanting different things. So you become aware of your own psychology. You become aware of the fact that you have complex structure in yourself and you need to, uh, model yourself to reverse engineer yourself to be able to predict how you will react to certain situations and how you deal with yourself in relationship to your environment. And this process, if this project, if you reverse engineer yourself and your relationship to reality and the nature of the universe that can contain you, if you go all the way, this is basically the project of AI. Or you could say the project of AI is a very important component in it. The true Turing test, in a way, is you ask a system what is intelligence. If that s- system is able to explain what it is, uh, how it works, then you wou- should, uh, assign it the property of being intelligent in this general sense. So the test that Turing was administering, in a way, I don't think that, uh, he couldn't see it, but he didn't express it yet in the original 1950 paper, is that, uh, he was trying to find out a- whether he was generally intelligent. Because in order to-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. (laughs)
- JBJoscha Bach
... take this test, the wrap is, of course, you need to be able to understand what that system is saying. And we don't yet know if we can build an AI. We don't yet know if we are generally intelligent. Basically, you win the Turing test by building an AI. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Yes. So it, so in a sense, hidden within the Turing test is a kind of recursive test.
- JBJoscha Bach
Yes, it's a test on us.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
The Turing test is basically a test of the conjecture whether people are intelligent enough to understand themselves.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay. But you also mentioned a little bit of a self-awareness, so... And in the project of AI, do you think this kind of emergent self-awareness is one of the fundamental aspects of intelligence? So as opposed to goal-oriented, as you said, kind of puzzle-solving, is coming to grips with the idea that you're an agent in the world, and like how you've-
- JBJoscha Bach
I find that many highly intelligent people are not very self-aware. Right? So, uh, self-awareness and intelligence are not the same thing. And you can also be self-aware if you have good priors especially-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
... without being especially intelligent. So you don't need to be very good at solving puzzles if the system that you are already implements the solution.
- LFLex Fridman
But I, I do find intelligence... So can you kind of... You mentioned children, right?
- JBJoscha Bach
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, i- is that the fundamental project of a- AI, is to create the learning system that's able to exist in the world? So you kinda drew a difference between self-awareness and, uh, intelligence.
- JBJoscha Bach
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
And yet you said that the self-awareness seems to be important for children.
- JBJoscha Bach
Uh, so I call this ability to make sense of the world and your own place in it, so to under- able, make you able to understand what you are doing in this world sentience. And I would distinguish sentience from intelligence-
- LFLex Fridman
Okay.
- JBJoscha Bach
... because sentience is the, uh, possessing certain classes of models. And intelligence is the way to get to these models if you don't already have them.
- LFLex Fridman
I see. So (sighs) can you, can you maybe pause a bit and try to, uh, answer the question that we just said we may not be able to answer? And it might be a recursive meta question of what is intelligence?
- 31:45 – 46:51
Mind vs Reality
- LFLex Fridman
what is dualism? What is idealism? What is materialism? What is functionalism? And what connects with you most in terms of... because you just mentioned there's a reality we don't have access to.
- JBJoscha Bach
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay. What does that even mean? (laughs) And why don't we get access to it? Aren't we part of that reality? Why don't we, why can't we access it?
- JBJoscha Bach
So, the particular trajectory that mostly exists in the West is the result of our indoctrination by a cult for 2,000 years.
- LFLex Fridman
A cult? Which one?
- JBJoscha Bach
Yes.
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, 2,000 years.
- JBJoscha Bach
The Ca- the Catholic cult mostly.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- JBJoscha Bach
And for better or worse, right? It has created, uh, or defined many of the modes of interaction that we have that hav- has created the society, but it has also, in some sense, um, scarred our rationality. And the intuition that exists, if you would translate, uh, the mythology of the Catholic Church into the modern world is that the world in which you and me interact is something like a multiplayer role-playing adventure.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- JBJoscha Bach
And the money and the objects that we have in this world, this is all not real. Or as, uh, Eastern philosophers would say, it's Maya. It's just, um, stuff that is, appears to be meaningful, and, uh, this embedding in this meaning, and if you believe in it, is Samsara. This-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
It's th- uh, basically the identification with the needs of the mundane, secular everyday existence. And, uh, the, uh, Catholics also introduced the notion of higher meaning, the sacred. And this existed before, but eventually the natural shape of God is the platonic form of the civilization that you are part of. It's basically the superorganism that is formed by the individuals as an intentional agent. And, uh, basically the Catholics used a relatively crude mythology to implement software on the minds of people and get the software synchronized to make them work in lockstep-
- LFLex Fridman
The software synchronized.
- JBJoscha Bach
... to basically get, uh, to get this God, uh, online and-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
... to make it efficient and effective. And, uh, I think G- uh, God technically is just a self that spans multiple brains as opposed to your and my self, which mostly exists just on one brain, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
And, uh, so in some sense you can construct a self functionally as a function that is implemented by brains that exists across brains. And this is a god with a small G.
- LFLex Fridman
That's one of the, if you l- uh, Yuval Harari kind of talking about, th- this is one of the nice features of our brains, it seems to, that we can, uh, all download the same piece of software, like God in this case, and kind of share it ???
- JBJoscha Bach
Yeah, so mathem- you give everybody a spec and the mathematical constraints, uh, that, uh, are, uh, intrinsic to information processing make sure that given the same spec, you come up with a compatible structure.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay. So that's, there's this space of ideas that we all share, and we think that's kind of the mind, but that's separate from... Uh, th- the idea is, fr- from, from Christianity, for, from religion, is that there's a separate thing between the mind and-
- JBJoscha Bach
There is a real world.
- LFLex Fridman
... there's a real world.
- JBJoscha Bach
And this real world is, uh, the world in which God exists. God is the coder of the multiplayer adventure, so to speak, and-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
... uh, we are all players in this game. And, um-
- LFLex Fridman
And that's dualism. You, you would say-
- JBJoscha Bach
Yes. But the, the dualist aspect-
- 46:51 – 51:09
Hard problem of consciousness
- LFLex Fridman
so what about the hard problem of consciousness? The- the- can you just linger on it? Like, w- why does it still feel... Like, I- I understand you're kinda... the self is an important part of the simulation, but why does the simulation feel like something?
- JBJoscha Bach
So if you look at a book by, say, George R. R. Martin, where the characters have plausible psychology-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
... and they stand on a hill, uh, because they want to conquer the city below the hill, and they're ????? it, and they look at the color of the sky, and they are apprehensive and feel, uh, empowered and all these things, why do they have these emotions? It's because it's written into the story, right? It's written into the story because there's an adequate model of the person that predicts what they're going to do next. And the same thing is hap- uh, uh, too for us. So it's basically a story that our brain is writing. It's not written in words, it's written in, uh, perceptual content, basically multimedia content, and it's a model of what the person would feel if it existed, so it's a virtual person, and you and me happen to be this virtual person. So if this virtual person gets access to the language center and talks about the sky being blue, and this is us.
- LFLex Fridman
But hold on a second, do I exist in your simulation? Like-
- JBJoscha Bach
You d- you do exist in an, uh, almost similar way as me, so there are internal states that I, uh, that are less accessible, uh, for me, um, th- that you have and so on, and your- my model might not be completely adequate. There are also things that I might perceive about you that you don't perceive, but in some sense, uh, both you and me are some puppets, two puppets that enact this, uh, play in my mind, and I identify with one of them because I can control one of the puppet directly, and with the other one, I can create, uh, things in between. So for instance, we can go on an interaction that even leads to a coupling, to a feedback loop, so we can think things together in a certain way or feel things together, but, uh, this coupling is itself not a physical phenomenon, it's entirely a software phenomenon. It's the result of two different implementations interacting with each other.
- LFLex Fridman
So, that's interesting. So, are- are you suggesting... I- I- d- like, the way you think about it, is the entirety of existence a simulation and we're kind of... each mind is a little sub-simulation that... Like, why don't you... why doesn't your mind have access to my mind's full state? Like-
- JBJoscha Bach
For the same reason that my mind doesn't have access to its own full state.
- LFLex Fridman
So what, uh, I mean-
- JBJoscha Bach
There is no trick involved. So basically when I s- know something about myself, it's because I made a model.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes, but there's-
- JBJoscha Bach
So one part of your brain is tasked with modeling what other parts of your brain are doing.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes, but there seems to be an incredible consistency about this world in the physical sense.
- JBJoscha Bach
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
That there's repeatable experiments and so on.
- JBJoscha Bach
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
How does that fit into our silly Descendants of Apes simulation of the world? So why is it so repea- why is everything so repeatable? And, uh, not everything, there- there's a lot of fundamental physics experiments that are repeatable-... for a long time, all over the place, and so on. The laws of physics-
- JBJoscha Bach
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... how, how does that fit in, do you think?
- JBJoscha Bach
It seems that the parts of the world that are not deterministic, uh, are not long lived. So if you build a system, any kind of, uh, automaton... So if you build simulations of something, uh, you'll notice that, uh, the phenomena that endure are those that give rise to stable dynamics. So basically, if you see anything that is complex in the world, it's the result of, usually of some control, of some feedback that keeps it stable around certain attractors. And the things that are not stable, that, uh, don't give rise to certain harmonic patterns and so on, they tend to get weeded out over time. So, uh, if we are in a region of the universe that sustains complexity, which is required to implement minds like ours, um, this is going to be a region of the universe that is very tightly controlled and controllable. So it's going to have lots of interesting symmetries and also symmetry breaks that allow to... The creation of structure.
- LFLex Fridman
But they exist where? So th- th- there's such an interesting idea that our mind is a simulation that's constructing the narrative. My, my question is l-
- 51:09 – 56:29
Connection between the mind and the universe
- LFLex Fridman
just to try to understand how that fits with this, with the entirety of the universe. You're saying that there's a, a region of this universe that allows enough complexity to create creatures like us, but what's the connection between the, the brain, the mind, and the broader universe? Which comes first? Which is more fundamental? Is the, is the mind the starting point and the universe is emergent? Is the universe the starting point and the minds are emergent?
- JBJoscha Bach
Um, I think quite clearly the latter. It's at least a much easier explanation-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
... because it allows us to make causal models. And I don't see any way to construct an inverse causality. I mean-
- LFLex Fridman
So like, what happens when you die to your mind simulation?
- JBJoscha Bach
Um, my implementation ceases. So basically, the thing that implements myself will no longer be present.
- LFLex Fridman
Got it.
- JBJoscha Bach
Which means if I am not implemented on the minds of other people, the thing that I identify with is... The, the weird thing is I don't actually have an identity beyond the identity that I construct. If I was the Dalai Lama, uh, he identifies as a form of government. So basically, the Dalai Lama gets reborn, not because he's confused, but, uh, because he is, uh, not identifying as a human being. He runs on a human being. He's basically a governmental software-
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- JBJoscha Bach
... that is instantiated in every new generation anew. So his advisors will pick someone who does this in the next generation. So if you identify with this, you are no longer human and you don't die in the sense that what dies is only the body of the human that you run on.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
Uh, he... To kill the Dalai Lama, you would have to kill his tradition. And, uh, if we look at ourselves, we realize that we are... To a small part like this, most of us. So for instance, if you have children, you realize something lives on-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
... in them or if you spark an idea in the world, something lives on, or if you identify with a society around you. Because you are in part that, you're not just this human being.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, so in a, in a sense, you are kind of like a Dalai Lama, in the sense that, uh, you, Joshua Bach, is just a collection of ideas. So like, you have this operating system on which a bunch of ideas live and interact, and then once you die they kind of... Part... Some of them, uh, jump off the ship.
- JBJoscha Bach
You put it, uh, put it the other way. Identity is a software state, it's a construction. It's not physically real. You, you know, identity is not a physical concept. It's basically a representation of different objects on the same world line.
- LFLex Fridman
But identity li- lives and dies. Are you attached... This is, it's, uh... What's the fundamental thing? Is it the ideas that come together to form an identity or is each individual identity actually a fundamental thing?
- JBJoscha Bach
It's a representation that you can get agency over if you care. So basically, you can choose what you identify with if you want to.
- LFLex Fridman
No, but it just seems, um, if, if the mind is not r- real, if it's not-
- JBJoscha Bach
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... that the, the birth and death is not, um, a crucial part of it.
- JBJoscha Bach
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Is... Well, may- maybe I'm s- uh, silly. I'm, maybe I'm s... Attached to this whole biological organism, but it seems that the physical... Being a physical object in this world is, is, um, an important aspect of birth and death. Like, it feels like it has to be physical to die. It feels like simulations don't have to die.
- JBJoscha Bach
The physics that we experience is not the real physics. There is, for instance-
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- JBJoscha Bach
... no color and sound in the real world. Color and sound are types of representations that you get if you want to, uh, model reality with oscillators, right? So colors and sound, in some sense, have octaves-
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- JBJoscha Bach
... and it's because they are represented probably with oscillators, right? So that's why colors form a circle of hues. And, uh, colors have harmonics, sounds have harmonics as a result of synchronizing oscillators in, in the brain, right? So the world that we subjectively interact with is f- fundamentally the result of the representation mechanisms in our brain. They are mathematically, to some degree, universal. There are certain regularities that you can discover in the patterns and not others-
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- JBJoscha Bach
... but the patterns that we get, this is not the real world. The world that we interact with is al- always made of too many parts to count, right? So the, uh, when you look at this table and so on, it's consisting of so many moli- uh, molecules and atoms that you cannot count them. So you only look at the aggregate dynamics, at limit dynamics. If you had almost infinitely many patterns, uh, particles, what would be the dynamics of the table? And this is roughly what you get. So geometry that we are interacting with is the result of discovering those operators that work in the limit that you get by building an infinite series that converges. For those parts where it converges, it's geometry, for those parts where it doesn't converge, it's chaos.
- 56:29 – 1:02:32
What is consciousness
- JBJoscha Bach
over.
- LFLex Fridman
The- the meaning of the relations-
- JBJoscha Bach
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... the graph. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Like, where does the... Maybe we can even step back and ask the question of what is consciousness to be sort of more systematic. Like, what- what- what do you- how do you think about consciousness? What is consciousness?
- JBJoscha Bach
I think that consciousness is largely a model of the contents of your attention. It's a mechanism that has evolved for a certain type of learning. At the moment, our machine learning systems largely work by, uh, building chains of weighted sums of real numbers with some, um, non-linearity. And, uh, you will learn by, um, piping an error signal through these different chained layers and adjusting the weights in these weighted sums. And you can approximate mo- most polynums with this, uh, if you have enough training data. But the price is you need to change a lot of these weights. Basically, the error, uh, is piped backwards into the system until it c- accumulates at certain junctures in the network and, uh, everything else evens out statistically. And only at these junctures, this is where you had the actual error in the network and you make the change there. This is a very slow process and our brains don't have enough time for that because we don't get old enough to play Go the way that our machines learn to play Go. So instead, what we do is an attention-based learning. We pinpoint the probable region in the network where we, uh, can make an improvement and then, uh, we store the- this binding state together with the expected outcome in a protocol. And this ability to make indexed memories for the purpose of learning to revisit these, uh, commitments later, this requires a memory of the contents of our attention. Another aspect is when I construct my reality, I make mistakes. So I see things that turn out to be reflections or shadows and so on, which means I have to be able to point out which features of my perception gave rise to the, uh, present construction of reality. So the system needs to pay attention to the, uh, features that are currently in its focus, and it also needs to pay attention to whether it pays attention itself, in part because the attentional system gets trained with the same mechanism, so it's reflexive, but also in part because your attention lapses if you don't pay attention to the attention itself.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- JBJoscha Bach
Right? So is the thing that I'm currently seeing just a- a dream that my brain has spun off into some kind of daydream or am I still paying attention to my percepts? So you have to periodically go back and see whether you're still paying attention, and if you have this loop and you make it tight enough between the system becoming aware of the contents of its attention and the fact that it's paying attention itself and makes attention the object of its attention, I think this is the loop over which we wake up.
- LFLex Fridman
So there's this (laughs) ... so there's this attentional mechanism that's somehow self-referential that's fundamental to what consciousness is.
- JBJoscha Bach
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
So just, uh, ask you a question, I don't know how much you're familiar with the recent breakthroughs in natural language processing. They use attentional mechanisms, they use something called transformers to, uh, learn patterns in sentences by allowing the network to focus its attention to particular parts of a sentence at each individual... So, like, parameterize and make it learnable the dynamics of a sentence by having, like, a little window into the- into the sentence. Wh- do you think that's, like, a little step towards... that eventually would- will take us to the attentional mechanisms from which consciousness could emerge?
- JBJoscha Bach
Not quite. I think it models only one aspect of attention. In the early days of automated, uh, language translation, there was a- an example that I found particularly funny where somebody tried to translate a text from English into German, and it was, "A bat broke the window." And, uh, the, uh, translation in German was, "Eine Fledermaus zerbrach das Fenster mit einem Baseballschläger." So to- to translate back into English, "A bat," uh, uh, this flying mammal-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
... "broke the window with a baseball bat."
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- JBJoscha Bach
And, uh, it seemed to be the most similar to this program because it somehow maximized, uh, the possibility of translating the concept "bat" into German in the same sentence. And this is some- a mistake that the transformer model is not doing because it's tracking identity. And the attentional mechanism in the transformer model is basically putting its finger on individual concepts and make sure that these concepts, um, pop up later in the text-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
... and, uh, tracks basically the individuals through the text. And it's why, uh, the system can learn things that other systems couldn't before it, which, uh, makes it, for instance, possible to write a text where it talks about the scientist and the scientist has a name and has a pronoun and, uh, it gets a consistent story about that thing. What it does not do, it doesn't fully integrate this, so this meaning falls apart at some point, it loses track of this context. It does not yet understand that everything that it says has to refer to the same universe, and this is where this thing falls apart. But the, uh, attention in a transformer model does not go beyond tracking identity and tracking identity is an important part of attention, but it's a different, very specific attentional mechanism, um, and it's not the one that gives rise to the type of consciousness that we have.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay. Just to linger on what- what do you mean by "identity" in the context of language?
- JBJoscha Bach
So, uh, when you talk about language, we have different words that can refer to the same concept.
- LFLex Fridman
Got it.
- JBJoscha Bach
And in the sense that-
- LFLex Fridman
So space of concepts. So, uh-
- JBJoscha Bach
Yes. And, uh, it can also be, uh, in a nominal sense or, uh, in an lexical sense that you say, uh, "This word does not only refer to this class of objects, but it refers to a definite object, to some kind of agent that weaves their way through- through the story and is only referred by different ways in the language."... so the language is basically a projection from, uh, a conceptual representation from a scene that is evolving into a discrete string of symbols. And, uh, what the transformer is able to do, it learns, um, aspects of this projection mechanism that other models couldn't learn.
- 1:02:32 – 1:09:02
Language and concepts
- JBJoscha Bach
- LFLex Fridman
So, have you ever seen an artificial intelligence or any kind of construction idea that allows for unlike neural networks or perhaps within neural networks that's able to form something where the space of concepts continues to be integrated? So what you're describing, building a knowl- knowledge base, building this consistent larger and larger sets of ideas that would then allow for deeper understanding.
- JBJoscha Bach
Uh, Wittgenstein thought that we can build everything from language, from basically a logical grammatical construct. And I think to some degree this was also what Minsky believed. So that's why he focused so much on common sense reasoning and so on. And, um, a project that was inspired by him was Cyc.
- LFLex Fridman
Cyc.
- JBJoscha Bach
Um, that was basically-
- LFLex Fridman
That's still going on.
- JBJoscha Bach
Yes. Of course, uh, ideas don't die, (laughs) only people die. And-
- LFLex Fridman
That, that's true. But, uh-
- JBJoscha Bach
And also is a productive project, it's just probably not one that is going to, uh, converge to general intelligence. The thing that Wittgenstein couldn't solve, and he looked at this in his, uh, book at the end of his life, Philosophical Investigations, was, uh, the notion of images. So images play an important role in Tractatus. The Tractatus is an attempt to basically turn philosophy into logical probing language, to design a logical language in which you can do actual philosophy that's rich enough for doing this. And the difficulty was to deal with perceptual content. And eventually I think he decided that he was not able to solve it. And I think this preempted the failure of the logicians program in AI. And the solution as we see it today is we need more general function approximation. There are functions, geometric functions, that we learn to approximate that cannot be efficiently expressed and computed in a grammatical language. We can, of course, build automata that go via number theory and so on and, uh, to learn the new algebra and then compute an approximation of this geometry. But, uh, to create language in geometry is not an efficient way to think about it.
- LFLex Fridman
So functional, uh, well, you kind of just said that neural networks are sort of... the approach that neural networks takes is actually more general than the, than what can be expressed through language.
- JBJoscha Bach
Yes. So what can be e- efficiently expressed through language at the data rates at which we process grammatical language.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay. So you don't think... so you don't think language is... so you disagree with Wittgenstein that language is not fundamental too?
- JBJoscha Bach
I agree with Whit- Wittgenstein. I just, uh, agree with the late Wittgenstein.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- JBJoscha Bach
And, uh, I also agree with the beauty of the early Wittgenstein. I think that the, the Tractatus itself is probably the most beautiful philosophical text that was written in the 20th century.
- LFLex Fridman
But, uh, but language is not fundamental to cognition and intelligence and consciousness?
- JBJoscha Bach
So, uh, I think that language is a particular way, or the natural language that we're using is a particular level of abstraction that we use to communicate with each other. But, uh, the languages in which we, uh, express geometry are not grammatical languages in the same sense, so they work slightly different, they're more general expressions of functions. And I think the general nature of a model is you have a bunch of parameters, um, these are- have a range because, uh, the variances of the world, and you have relationships between them which are constraints, which say if certain parameters have these values, then other parameters have to have the following values. And, um, this is a very early insight in computer science, and I, I think the- some of the earliest formulations is the Boltzmann machine. And the problem with the Boltzmann machine is that, uh, while it has a measure of whether it's good, it's basically the energy on the system, the amount of tension that you have left in the constraints, where the constraints don't quite match, um, it's very difficult to, despite having this global measure, to train it. Because if you- as, as soon as you add more than trivially few elements, uh, parameters into the system, it's very difficult to get it settled in the right architecture. And so we... uh, the solution that Hinton and Zanichovsky found was, um, to use a restricted Boltzmann machine which uses the hidden links, the internal links in, in the Boltzmann machine, and only has based the input and output layer. But this limits the expressivity of the Boltzmann machine, so now he builds a network of small, of these primitive Boltzmann machines. And in some sense you can see a almost continuous development from this to the deep learning models that we're using today, even though we don't use Boltzmann machines at, at this point. But the idea of the Boltzmann machine is you take this model, you clamp some of the values to perception, and this forces the entire machine to go into a state that is compatible with the states that you currently perceive, and this state is your model of the world. Right? So I, I think it's a very general way of thinking about models. But we have to, uh, use a different approach to make it work. And this is we have to find different networks that train the Boltzmann machine. So the mechanism that trains the Boltzmann machine and the mechanism that makes the Boltzmann machine settle into its state are distinct from the constrained architecture of the Boltzmann machine itself.
- LFLex Fridman
The, the kind of mechanism that we want to develop, you're saying?
- JBJoscha Bach
Yes. So this, the direction in which I think our research is going to go is going to... for instance, what you notice in perception is our perceptual models of the world are not probabilistic, but possibilistic, which means-
- LFLex Fridman
What's that mean?
- JBJoscha Bach
... you should be able to perceive things that are improbable but possible. Right?
- LFLex Fridman
Interesting.
- JBJoscha Bach
A perceptual state is valid not if it's probable, but if it's possible, if it's co- coherent.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
So if you see a tiger coming after you, you should be able to see this even if it's unlikely.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JBJoscha Bach
And, uh, the probability is necessary for convergence of the model. So given the state of possibilities that is very, very large and a set of perceptual features, how should you change the state of- states of the model to get it to converge with your perception?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.But the space of, uh, the space of ideas that are coherent with the context that you're sensing is perhaps not as large. I mean, that- that's perhaps pretty small.
- JBJoscha Bach
The degree of coherence that you, uh, need to achieve depends, of course, how deep your models go. There is, uh, for instance, politics is very simple when you know very little about game theory and human nature.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- 1:09:02 – 1:16:35
Meta-learning
- LFLex Fridman
you know, the current neural networks are a fundamentally supervised learning system with a feedforward neural network, use back-propagation to learn.
- JBJoscha Bach
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
What's your intuition about what kind of mechanisms might we move towards to improve the learning procedure?
- JBJoscha Bach
Uh, I think one big aspect is going to be meta-learning, and architecture search starts in this direction. In some sense, the first wave of AI, classical AI worked by identifying a problem and a possible solution and implementing the solution, right? Program that plays chess. And, um, right now we are in the second wave of AI. So instead of writing the algorithm that, uh, implements the solution, we write an algorithm that automatically searches for an algorithm that implements the solution. So the learning system, in some sense, is an algorithm that itself discovers the algorithm that solves the problem, like Go. Go is too hard to implement it by, the solution by hand, but we can implement an algorithm that finds the solution.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, so that, yeah-
- JBJoscha Bach
So now let's move to the third stage, right? The third stage would be meta-learning, find an algorithm that discovers a learning algorithm for the given domain. Our brain is probably not a learning system, but a meta-learning system. This is one way of looking at what we are doing. There is another way if you look at the way our brain is, for instance, implemented. There is no central control that tells all the neurons how to fire up.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- JBJoscha Bach
Instead, every neuron is an individual reinforcement learning agent. Every neuron is a single-celled organism that is quite complicated and in some sense quite motivated to get fed.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
And it gets fed if it fires on average at the right time.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- JBJoscha Bach
And the, um, the right time depends on the context that the, uh, this neuron exists in, which is the electrical and chemical environment that it has. So it basically has to, uh, learn a function over its environment that tells us when to fire to get fed. Or if you see it as a reinforcement learning agent, every neuron is, in some sense, making a hypothesis when it sends a signal and tries to pipe a signal through the universe and tries to get positive feedback for it. And the entire thing is set up in such a way that it's robustly self-organizing into a brain.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- JBJoscha Bach
Which means you start out with different neuron types, um, that have different priors in, uh, on which hypothesis to test on how to get its reward. And you put them into different concentrations in a certain spatial alignment, and, uh, then you entrain it in a particular order. And as a result, you get a well-organized brain.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, so, okay, so the brain is a meta-learning system, uh, with a bunch of, uh, with reinforcement learning agents. And what... I think you said, but, uh, just to clarify, where do the lo- there's no centralized, uh, government that tells you, "Here's a loss function, here's a loss function, here's a loss function." Like what, uh, who is, uh, who says what's the objective of what's being optimized?
- JBJoscha Bach
There are also governments which impose loss functions on different parts of the brain. So we have differential attention. Some areas in your brain get specially rewarded when you look at faces.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
If you don't have that, you will get prosopagnosia, which basically me- the inability to tell people apart by their faces.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
So, uh-
- LFLex Fridman
And the reason that happens is because it was, uh, had an evolutionary advantage. So like evolution comes into play here about...
- JBJoscha Bach
Yeah, but it's basically an extraordinary attention that we have for faces. I don't think that people with prosopagnosia have a, per se, a defective brain. The, uh, the brain just has an average attention for faces. So people with prosopagnosia don't look at faces more than they look at cups. So the level at which they resolve the geometry of faces is not higher than the one that, than for cups. And people that don't have prosopagnosia look, uh, obsessively at faces, right? For you and me, it's impossible to move through a crowd without scanning the faces. And as a result, we make insanely detailed models of faces that allow us to discern mental states of people.
- LFLex Fridman
So obviously, we don't know 99% of the details of this meta-learning system that's our mind. Okay. H- but still we took a leap from something much dumber-
- JBJoscha Bach
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... to that from, uh, through the evolutionary process. Can you, first of all, maybe say h- how hard do you, how big of a leap is that from our brain, from our ape ancestors, to multi-cell organisms? And, um, is there something we can think about, about th- as we start to think about how to engineer intelligence, is there something we can learn from evolution?
- JBJoscha Bach
In some sense, uh, life exists because of the market opportunity of controlled chemical reactions. We compete with dumb chemical reactions, and we win in some areas against this dumb combustion because we can harness those entropy gradients where you need to add a little bit of energy in a specific way to harvest more energy.
- LFLex Fridman
So we out-competed combustion? (laughs)
- JBJoscha Bach
Yes, in many regions we do. And we try very hard because, uh, when we are in direct competition, we lose, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- JBJoscha Bach
So, uh, because, uh, the combustion is going to close the entropy gradients much faster than we can run.
- 1:16:35 – 1:18:10
Spirit
- JBJoscha Bach
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, can you, can you actually linger on that? Like, w- why do you say that spirit... Just to clarify because I'm a little bit confused. So, th- the, the, the word spirit is a powerful thing, but why did you say in the last year or so that you discovered this? Uh, uh, do you mean the same old traditional idea of a spirit? Or do you mean it's-
- JBJoscha Bach
I tried to find out what people mean by spirit. When people say spirituality in the US, it usually is the, refers to the phantom limb that they develop in the absence of culture. And a culture is, in some sense, you could say the spirit of a society that is long game. This thing that, uh, is, becomes self-aware at a level b- above the individuals where you say, "If you don't do the following things, then the grand, grand, grand grandchildren of our children will now have nothing to eat."
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- JBJoscha Bach
So, uh, if you take this long scope where you try to maximize the lengths of the game that you are playing as a species to realize that you're part of a larger thing that you cannot fully control, you probably just need to submit to the, uh, ecosphere instead of trying to completely control it, right? There needs to be a- a certain level at which we can exist as a species if we want to endure. And our culture is not sustaining this anymore. We basically made this bet with the Industrial Revolution that we can control everything, and the modernist societies with basically unfettered growth led to a situation, uh, in which we depend on the ability to control the entire planet. And, uh, since we are not able to do that, as it seems, um, this culture will die.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- JBJoscha Bach
And we, we realize that it doesn't have a future, right? We called our children Generation Z. (laughs) It's not very optimistic thing to do.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- 1:18:10 – 1:37:48
Our civilization may not exist for long
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, uh, so y- you can have this kind of intuition that our civilization, you said culture, but you really mean the s- the spirit of the civilization, the, uh, the entirety of the civilization may not exist for long.
- JBJoscha Bach
Yeah. So-
- LFLex Fridman
What's your... Can you, can you untangle that? What's your intuition behind that? So you, you kind of offline mentioned to me that the Industrial Revolution was kind of a, the moment we agreed to accept the offer, sign on the paper, on the dotted line with the Industrial Revolution, we doomed ourselves. Can you elaborate on that?
Episode duration: 3:00:17
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