Joscha Bach: Nature of Reality, Dreams, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #212

1. 0:00 – 0:33

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Joscha Bach, his second time on the podcast. Joscha is one of the most fascinating minds in the world, exploring the nature of intelligence, cognition, computation, and consciousness. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors, Coinbase, Codecademy, Linode, NetSuite, and ExpressVPN. Their links are in the description. This is the Lex Fridman podcast, and here is my conversation with Joscha Bach.

2. 0:33 – 2:56

   Life is hard

   1. LFLex Fridman0:33

      Thank you for once again coming onto this particular Russian program and sticking to the theme of a Russian program. Let's start with the darkest of topics.

   2. JBJoscha Bach0:43

      (Russian) . (laughs)

   3. LFLex Fridman0:45

      (laughs) So this is inspired by one of your tweets. You wrote that, quote, "When life feels unbearable, (laughs) I remind myself that I'm not a person. I'm a piece of software running on the brain of a random ape for a few decades. It's not the worst brain to run on." Have you experienced low points in your life? Have you experienced depression?

   4. JBJoscha Bach1:09

      Of course, we all experience low points in our life, and we get appalled by the things, by the ugliness of stuff around us. We might get, uh, desperate about our lack of self-regulation. And, um, sometimes, it's life is hard, and I suspect, uh, you don't get through your life, nobody does toge- gets through their life without low points and without moments where they're despairing. And I thought that, uh, uh, let's capture this state and how to deal with that state. And I found that very often you realize that when you stop taking things personally, when you realize that this notion of a person is a fiction, similar as it is in West World, where the robots realize that their memories and desires are just stuff that keeps them in the loop, and they don't have to act on those memories and desires, that our memories and expectations is what make us unhappy, and the present rarely does. The, the day in which we are, for the most part, it's okay, right? When we are right sitting here, right here, right now, we can choose how we feel. And the thing that affects us is the expectation that something is going to be different from what we want it to be or the memory that something was different from what you wanted it to be. And, um, once we basically zoom out from all this, what's left is not a person. What's left is this state of being conscious, which is a software state, and software doesn't have an identity. It's a physical law, and it's a law that acts in all of us, and, uh, it's embedded in a suitable substrate, and we didn't pick that substrate, right? We are mostly randomly instantiated on it, and there are all these individuals, and everybody has to be one of them, and, uh, eventually you're stuck on one of them and, um, have to deal with that.

3. 2:56 – 9:42

   Consciousness

   1. JBJoscha Bach2:56

   2. LFLex Fridman2:56

      So you're like a leaf floating down the river. You just have to accept that there's a river and you just float-

   3. JBJoscha Bach3:03

      You don't have to do this.

   4. LFLex Fridman3:05

      ... wherever the river takes you.

   5. JBJoscha Bach3:05

      The thing is that the illusion that you are an agent is a construct, right? What part of that is actually under your control? And I think that our consciousness is largely a control model for our own attention. So we notice where we are looking, and we can influence what we are looking, how we are disambiguating things, how we put things together in our mind.

   6. LFLex Fridman3:26

      Mm-hmm.

   7. JBJoscha Bach3:26

      And the whole system that runs us is this big cybernetic motivational system. So we're basically like a little monkey sitting on top of an elephant, and we can prod this elephant here and there to go this way or that way, and we might have the illusion that we are the elephant or that we are telling it what to do, and sometimes we notice that it walks into a completely different direction.

   8. LFLex Fridman3:47

      So-

   9. JBJoscha Bach3:47

      And we didn't set this thing up. It, it just is the situation that we find ourselves in.

   10. LFLex Fridman3:52

       How much prodding can we actually do of the elephant?

   11. JBJoscha Bach3:56

       A lot. But, uh, I think that our, uh, consciousness cannot create the motive force.

   12. LFLex Fridman4:03

       Is the elephant consciousness in this metaphor? (laughs)

   13. JBJoscha Bach4:05

       No, the monkey is the consciousness. The monkey is the attentional system that is observing things. There is a large perceptual system combined with a motivational system-

   14. LFLex Fridman4:14

       Yeah.

   15. JBJoscha Bach4:14

       ... that is actually providing the interface to everything, and our own consciousness, I think, is a tool that directs the attention of that system, which means it singles out features and, uh, performs conditional operations for which it needs an index memory. But, uh, this index memory is what we perceive as our stream of consciousness, but the consciousness is not in charge. That's an illusion.

   16. LFLex Fridman4:36

       So everything outside of that consciousness is the elephant. So it's the physics of the universe, but it's also society that's outside of your...

   17. JBJoscha Bach4:46

       I would say the elephant is the agent, so there is an environment through which the agent is stomping, and, uh, you are influencing a little part of that agent.

   18. LFLex Fridman4:55

       So, uh, can you... Uh, is the agent a single human being? What's, what, which object has agency?

   19. JBJoscha Bach5:02

       That's an interesting question. I think a way to think about an agent is that it's a controller with a setpoint generator. The notion of a controller comes from cybernetics and control theory. Control system consists out of, um, a system that is regulating, uh, some value and, uh, the deviation of that value from a setpoint, and it has a sensor that measures, uh, the system's deviation from that setpoint, and an effector that can be parameterized by the controller. So the controller tells the effector to do a certain thing, and the goal is to reduce the distance between the setpoint and the current value of the system, and there's environment which disturbs the regulated system, which brings it away from that setpoint. So simplest case is a thermostat, and the thermostat is really simple because it doesn't have a model. The thermostat is only trying to minimize the setpoint deviation in the next moment.

   20. LFLex Fridman5:55

       Mm-hmm.

   21. JBJoscha Bach5:55

       And if you want to minimize the setpoint deviation over a longer time span, you need to integrate it. You need to m- model what is going to happen. So for instance, when you think about, uh, that your setpoint is to be comfortable in life...... maybe you need to make yourself uncomfortable first.

   22. LFLex Fridman6:11

       Mm-hmm.

   23. JBJoscha Bach6:11

       Right? So you need to make a model of what's going to happen when. And this is the task of the controller, is to use its sensors, uh, to measure the state of the environment and the system that is being regulated, and figure out what to do. And if the task is complex enough, the set points are complicated enough, and if the controller has enough capacity and enough, um, sensor feedback, then the task of the controller is to make a model of the entire universe that it's in, the conditions under which it exists, and of itself. And this is a very complex agent, and we are in that category.

   24. LFLex Fridman6:45

       Mm-hmm.

   25. JBJoscha Bach6:45

       And an agent is not necessarily a thing in the universe. It's a class of models that we use to interpret aspects of the universe. And, uh, we, when we notice, uh, that ri- around us, a lot of things only make sense at the level that should we entangle with them if we interpret them as control systems, that make models of the world and try to minimize their own set points.

   26. LFLex Fridman7:07

       So, but the models are the agents?

   27. JBJoscha Bach7:10

       The agent is a class of model. And we notice that we are an agent ourself. We are the agent that is using our own control model-

   28. LFLex Fridman7:17

       Yeah.

   29. JBJoscha Bach7:17

       ... to perform actions. We notice, we ch- um, produce a change in the model and things in the world change. And this is how we discover the idea that we have a body, that we are situated in environment, and that we have a first-person perspective.

   30. LFLex Fridman7:31

       Still don't understand what's the best way to think of which object has agency with, with respect to human beings. Is, is it the body? Is it the brain? Is it the contents of the brain that has agency? Like, what's the actuators that you're referring to? What is the controller and where does it reside? Or is it these impossible things? Like, 'cause I, I keep trying to ground it to spacetime, the three dimension of space and the one dimension of time. What's the agent in that for humans?
4. 9:42 – 19:51

   What is life?

   1. JBJoscha Bach9:42

   2. LFLex Fridman9:42

      Can I ask you a personal question? Uh, what's the line between life and non-life? Uh, it's personal because you're a, a life form. So, what do you think in this, uh, uh, emergent complexity, at which point does a thing start being living and have agency?

   3. JBJoscha Bach10:00

      Personally, I think that the simplest answer there is that life is cells because, um-

   4. LFLex Fridman10:04

      Uh, life is what?

   5. JBJoscha Bach10:05

      Cells.

   6. LFLex Fridman10:06

      Cells.

   7. JBJoscha Bach10:06

      Biological cells. So it's a particular kind of principle that we have discovered to exist in nature. It's modular, uh, stuff that consists out of, um, basically this DNA tape with a read-write head on top of it-

   8. LFLex Fridman10:20

      Mm-hmm.

   9. JBJoscha Bach10:20

      ... um, that is able to perform arbitrary computations and state transitions within the cell. And, uh, it's combined with a membrane that insulates, uh, the cell from its environment. And, uh, there are, uh, chemical reactions inside of the cell that are in disequilibrium. And the cell is running in such a way that this disequilibrium doesn't disappear, and the cell, uh, goes, if the cell goes into an equilibrium state, it dies.

   10. LFLex Fridman10:46

       Yeah.

   11. JBJoscha Bach10:46

       And it re- uh, requires something like an negentropy extractor to maintain this disequilibrium. So it's able to harvest negentropy from its environment and keep itself running.

   12. LFLex Fridman10:58

       Yeah, so there's information and there's a wall to, to protect, to, to, to maintain this disequilibrium. But isn't this very Earth-centric? Like, what you're referring to as a, as a-

   13. JBJoscha Bach11:09

       I'm not making a normative notion. Uh, you could say that there are probably other things in the universe that are cell-like and life-like, and you could also call them life. But eventually, it's just, uh, a willingness of, to find an agreement of how to use the terms. I like cells because it's completely co-extential of just the way that we use the word even before we knew about cells.

   14. LFLex Fridman11:30

       Mm-hmm.

   15. JBJoscha Bach11:30

       So people were pointing at some stuff and saying this is somehow animate, and this is very different from the non-animate stuff, and what's the difference between the living and the dead stuff? And it's mostly whether the cells are working or not. And, uh, also this boundary of life where we say that, for instance, a virus is basically an information packet that is subverting the cell and not life by itself. That, uh, makes sense to me. And it's somewhat arbitrary. You could, of course, say that systems that permanently maintain a disequilibrium and can self-replicate are always life.

   16. LFLex Fridman12:03

       Mm-hmm.

   17. JBJoscha Bach12:03

       And maybe that's a useful definition, too. But, um, this is eventually just how you want to use the word.

   18. LFLex Fridman12:10

       Is it, uh, so useful for conversation but-Is it, uh, somehow fundamental to the universe? Do you think there's a actual line to eventually be drawn between life and non-life or is it all a kind of continuum?

   19. JBJoscha Bach12:24

       I don't think it's a continuum, but there is nothing magical that is happening. Um, living systems are a certain type of machine.

   20. LFLex Fridman12:31

       What about non-living systems? Is it also a machine?

   21. JBJoscha Bach12:34

       There are, uh, non-living machines, but, uh, the question is at which point is a system able to un- uh, perform arbitrary state transitions in order to make representations. And living things can do this, and, of course, we can also build non-living things that can do this. But we don't know anything in nature that is not a cell and is not created by cellular life that is able to do that.

   22. LFLex Fridman12:58

       N- not- not only do we not know, I don't think we have the tools to see otherwise. I- I always worry that we- we, uh, look at the world too narrowly. Like, we have- there could be life of a very different kind right under our noses that we're just not seeing because we're not... either limitations of our cognitive capacity or we're just not open-minded enough, either with the tools of science or just the tools of our own mind.

   23. JBJoscha Bach13:32

       Yeah, that's possible. I find this thought very fascinating. And I suspect that many of us ask ourselves since childhood what are the things that we are missing, what kind of systems and interconnections exist that are outside of our gaze. But the, um... we are looking for it, and physics doesn't let, uh, have much room at the moment for, uh, um, opening up something that would not violate, uh, the conservation of information as we know it.

   24. LFLex Fridman14:03

       Yeah, but I- I wonder about time- time scale, and scale, spatial scale, whether we just need to, um, open up our idea of what... like, how life presents itself. It could be operating at a much slower time scale-

   25. JBJoscha Bach14:17

       Yeah.

   26. LFLex Fridman14:18

       ... a much faster time scale. And, um, it- it's almost sad to think that there's all this life around us that we're not seeing because we're just not, like, thinking in terms of the right- of the right scale, both time and space.

   27. JBJoscha Bach14:34

       What is your definition of life? What do you understand as life?

   28. LFLex Fridman14:38

       Hmm. Entities of sufficiently high complexity that are full of surprises. (laughs)

   29. JBJoscha Bach14:50

       (laughs)

   30. LFLex Fridman14:50

       May- I don't know. I- I don't have a free will, so that just came out of my mouth. I'm not sure if that even makes sense. There's certain characteristics, so complexity seems to be a- a necessary property of life, and I almost want to say it has ability to do something unexpected. Um...
5. 19:51 – 33:56

   Free will

   1. LFLex Fridman19:51

      Uh, you mentioned the elephant and the m- the monkey riding the elephant, and, uh, consciousness is the monkey, and there's some prodding that the monkey gets to do, and sometimes the elephant listens. I heard you got into some contenti- Maybe you can correct me, but I heard you got into some contentious free will discussions. Um, is this with Sam Harris or something like that?

   2. JBJoscha Bach20:16

      Not that I know of. I- (laughs)

   3. LFLex Fridman20:18

      Some, some, some people on QuadPods told me you made a, a bunch of, uh, um, big debate points about free will. Well, let me just then ask you, where, where, in terms of the monkey and the elephant, uh, do you think we land in terms of the illusion of free will? How much control does the monkey have?

   4. JBJoscha Bach20:38

      Uh, we have to think about what the, um, free will is in the first place. We are not the machine. We are not the thing that is making the decisions. We are model of that decision-making process.

   5. LFLex Fridman20:49

      Yeah.

   6. JBJoscha Bach20:49

      And there is a difference between making your own decisions and predicting your own decisions.

   7. LFLex Fridman20:55

      Yes.

   8. JBJoscha Bach20:56

      And that difference is the first-person perspective. And what, um, di- basically makes decision-making, um, under conditions of free will distinct from just automatically doing the best thing is that, uh, we often don't know what the best thing is. We make decisions under uncertainty. We make informed bets using a betting algorithm that we don't yet understand because we haven't reverse-engineered our own minds sufficiently. We don't know the expected rewards. We don't know the mechanism by which we estimate the rewards and so on. We only-

   9. LFLex Fridman21:27

      But there is an algorithm.

   10. JBJoscha Bach21:28

       We observe ourselves performing-

   11. LFLex Fridman21:30

       Mm-hmm.

   12. JBJoscha Bach21:30

       ... where we see that, uh, we weight facts and factors and the future, and then some kind of possibility, some motive gets raised to an intention. And that's informed bet that the system is making. And that making of the informed bet, the representation of that, is what we call free will. And it seems to be paradoxical because we think that's... the crucial thing is about it that it's somehow indeterministic, and yet if it was indeterministic, it would be random. And it can- It cannot be random because it was... if it was random, if just dice were being thrown and the universe randomly forces you to do things, it would be meaningless. So, the important part of the decisions is always the deterministic stuff. But, um, it appears to be indeterministic to you because it's unpredictable. Because if it was predictable, you wouldn't experience it as a free will decision-

   13. LFLex Fridman22:21

       Right.

   14. JBJoscha Bach22:21

       ... you would experience it as just doing the necessary right thing. And you see this continuum between the free will and the execution of automatic behavior when you're observing other people. So, for instance, when you are observing your own children. If you don't understand them, you will abuse this agent model where you have a qu- an agent with a setpoint generator-

   15. LFLex Fridman22:43

       Mm-hmm.

   16. JBJoscha Bach22:43

       ... and, uh, the agent is doing the best it can to minimize the difference to the setpoint, and it might be confused and, uh, sometimes impulsive or whatever, but it's acting on its own free will.

   17. LFLex Fridman22:52

       Mm-hmm.

   18. JBJoscha Bach22:53

       And when you understand what happens in the mind of the child, you see that it's automatic and you can outmodel the child, you can build things around the child that will, uh, lead the child to making exactly the decision that you are predicting. And in... under these circumstances, like when you are a stage magician or somebody who is dealing, uh, with people that there's... you sell a car to, and you completely understand the psychology and the impulses and the space of thoughts that this individual can have at that moment. Under these circumstances, it makes no sense to attribute free will, because it's no longer decision-making under uncertainty. You are already certain. For them, there's uncertainty, but you already know what they're doing.

   19. LFLex Fridman23:33

       But what about for you? So, is this akin to, like, systems like cellular automata where it's deterministic, but when you squint your eyes a little bit, it starts look like there's agents making decisions at the higher sort of... when you zoom out and look at the entities that are composed by the individual cells? Even though the... there's, uh, underlying simple rules that, uh, make the system evolve in deterministic ways, it looks like there's organisms making decisions. Is that where the illusion of free will emerges, that jump in scale?

   20. JBJoscha Bach24:17

       It's a particular type of model, but this jump in scale is crucial. The jump in scale happens whenever you have too many parts to count and you cannot make a model at that level-

   21. LFLex Fridman24:26

       Okay.

   22. JBJoscha Bach24:26

       ... and you try to find some higher-level regularity. And the higher-level regularity is a pattern that you project into the world to make sense of it, and agency is one of these patterns, right? You have all these cells that interact with each other, and the cells in our body are set up in such a way that they benefit if their behavior is coherent-

   23. LFLex Fridman24:45

       Yeah.

   24. JBJoscha Bach24:45

       ... which means that they act as if they were serving a common goal.

   25. LFLex Fridman24:49

       Right.

   26. JBJoscha Bach24:49

       And which, that means that they will evolve regulation mechanisms that, uh, act as if they were serving a common goal. And now you can make sense of these, all these cells by projecting the common goal into them.

   27. LFLex Fridman25:00

       Right. So for you then, free will is an illusion?

   28. JBJoscha Bach25:03

       No, it's a model and it's a construct. It's basically a model that the system is making of its own behavior, and it's the best model that it can come up with under the circumstances. And it can get replaced by a different model, which is automatic behavior when you fully understand the mechanism under which you're acting.

   29. LFLex Fridman25:19

       Yeah, but the m- another word for model is, what? Story. So it's the story you're telling. I mean, do you actually have control? Is there such a thing as a you, and is there such a thing as you having control? It's like, are you manifesting your evolution as a, as a entity?

   30. JBJoscha Bach25:42

       In some sense, the you as the model of the system that is in control. It's a story that the system tells itself about somebody who is in control.
6. 33:56 – 36:06

   Simulation

   1. JBJoscha Bach33:56

      There is a difference between a reality, a simulation, and a simulacrum.

   2. LFLex Fridman34:01

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JBJoscha Bach34:02

      The, um, reality that we are talking about is something that fully emerges over a causally closed lowest layer. And the idea of physicalism is that we are in that layer, that basically our world emerges over that. Every alternative to physicalism is a simulation theory, which basically says that we are in some kind of simulation universe and the real world needs to be an apparent universe of that, where the actual causal structure is, right?

   4. LFLex Fridman34:24

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JBJoscha Bach34:24

      And when you look at the ocean in your own mind, you are looking at a simulation that explains what you're going to see next, and-

   6. LFLex Fridman34:31

      So, we are living in a simulation?

   7. JBJoscha Bach34:32

      Yes, but the simulation generated by our own brains.

   8. LFLex Fridman34:36

      Yeah.

   9. JBJoscha Bach34:36

      And, uh, this simulation is different from the physical reality because the causal structure that is being produced, what you are seeing, is different from the causal structure of physics.

   10. LFLex Fridman34:45

       But consistent?

   11. JBJoscha Bach34:46

       Uh, hopefully. If not, then you are going to end up in some kind of institution where people will take care of you because your behavior will be inconsistent, right? Your, uh, behavior needs to work in such a way that it's, uh, interacting with an accurately predictive model of reality. And if your brain is unable to make your model of reality predictive, um, you will need help.

   12. LFLex Fridman35:06

       So, what, uh, what do you think about Donald Hoffman's argument that it doesn't have to be consistent, the dream world, to the, the, what he calls, like, the interface, um, to the actual physical reality, where there could be evolutio- I think he makes an evolutionary argument, which is like it- it could be an evolutionary advantage to have the dream world drift away from physical reality.

   13. JBJoscha Bach35:31

       I think that only works if you have tenure.

   14. LFLex Fridman35:32

       (laughs)

   15. JBJoscha Bach35:32

       As long as you're still interacting with the ground tools, your internal model needs to be somewhat predictive. (laughs)

   16. LFLex Fridman35:38

       I'll tell you. Well, in some sense, humans have achieved a kind of tenure in the animal kingdom. (laughs)

   17. JBJoscha Bach35:45

       Yeah.

   18. LFLex Fridman35:45

       It's-

   19. JBJoscha Bach35:45

       And at some point, we became too big too fail, so we became postmodernists. (laughs)

   20. LFLex Fridman35:51

       (laughs) It all makes sense now.

   21. JBJoscha Bach35:52

       We created this version of reality that we like. (laughs)

   22. LFLex Fridman35:55

       Oh, man. Okay.

   23. JBJoscha Bach35:57

       Uh, yeah, but, uh, basically, you can do magic. You can change your assessment of reality, but eventually, uh, reality is going to come bite you in the ass if it's not

7. 36:06 – 51:42

   Base layer of reality

   1. JBJoscha Bach36:06

      predictive.

   2. LFLex Fridman36:06

      Do you have a sense of what is that base layer physical reality? You have, like, uh... So, you have these attempts at the theories of everything, the very, very small of, like, string theory or what, um, Stephen Wolfram talks about with the hypergraphs. These are these tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny objects, and then there is more like-... quantum mechanics, that's talking about objects that are much larger, but still very, very, very tiny. Do you have a sense of where the tiniest thing is, that is like at the lowest level? The turtle at the very bottom, do you have a sense what-

   3. JBJoscha Bach36:45

      I, I don't think that-

   4. LFLex Fridman36:46

      ... what that turtle is?

   5. JBJoscha Bach36:46

      ... you can talk about where it is, because space is emergent over the activity-

   6. LFLex Fridman36:50

      Yes.

   7. JBJoscha Bach36:50

      ... of these things. So, space, uh, uh, these coordinates only exist in relation to the p- um, things, other things. And so you could, in some sense, abstract it into locations that can hold information and trajectories that the information can take between the different locations. And this is how we construct our notion of space.

   8. LFLex Fridman37:10

      Yeah.

   9. JBJoscha Bach37:10

      And, uh, physicists, uh, usually have a notion of space that is continuous, and this is a point where I, uh, tend to agree with people like Stephen Wolfram, who are very skeptical of the geometric notions. I think that geometry is the dynamics of too many parts to count. And, um-

   10. LFLex Fridman37:28

       (laughs)

   11. JBJoscha Bach37:29

       ... when there are no infinities. If there were two infinities, you would be running into contradictions, which is in some sense what, uh, Godel and Turing discovered-

   12. LFLex Fridman37:37

       Mm-hmm.

   13. JBJoscha Bach37:37

       ... in response to Hilbert's quall. So-

   14. LFLex Fridman37:40

       There are no infinities.

   15. JBJoscha Bach37:41

       There are no infinities.

   16. LFLex Fridman37:42

       In- infinity is fake.

   17. JBJoscha Bach37:42

       There is unboundedness, but if you have a language that talks about infinity, at some point the language is going to contradict itself, which means it's no longer valid. In order to deal with infinities in mathematics, you have to postulate the existence in, uh, initially. You cannot construct the infinities. And that's an issue, right? You cannot build up an infinity from zero. But, uh, in practice, you never do this, right? When you perform calculations, you only look at the dynamics of too many parts to count. And, uh, usually these, um, numbers are not that large. They're not googles or something. The p- uh, the infinities that we are dealing with in our universe are mathematically speaking, relatively small integers. And, um, still what we are looking at is dynamics where, um, uh, a trillion things behave, uh, similar to 100 trillion things or, uh, uh, um, something that is very, very large-

   18. LFLex Fridman38:37

       Mm-hmm.

   19. JBJoscha Bach38:37

       ... because they're converging.

   20. LFLex Fridman38:39

       Yeah.

   21. JBJoscha Bach38:39

       And these convergent dynamics, these operators, this is what we, uh, deal with when we are doing the geometry. Right? Geometry is stuff where we can pretend that it's continuous, because, uh, as- if we subdivide the space sufficiently, uh, fine-grained, uh, these things approach a certain dynamic. And this approached dynamic, that is what we mean by it.

   22. LFLex Fridman38:58

       Mm-hmm.

   23. JBJoscha Bach38:59

       But I don't think that infinity would work, so to speak, that you would know the last digit of pi and that you have a physical process that rests on knowing the last digit of pi.

   24. LFLex Fridman39:09

       Yeah. That, that could be just a p- peculiar quirk of human cognition, that we like discrete. Discrete makes sense to us, infinity doesn't, s- in terms of our intuitions.

   25. JBJoscha Bach39:19

       No, the issue is that, uh, everything that we think about, uh, needs to be expressed in some kind of mental language, not ne- not necessarily natural language, but some kind of mathematical language that your neurons can speak that refers to something in the world. And what we have discovered is that, uh, we cannot construct a notion of infinity without running into contradictions, which means that such a language is no longer valid. And I suspect this is what, uh, made Pythagoras so unhappy when somebody came up with the notion of irrational numbers before it was time, right? There's this myth that he had this person killed when he blabbed out the secret that not everything can be expressed as a ratio between two numbers, but there-

   26. LFLex Fridman39:57

       Yeah.

   27. JBJoscha Bach39:57

       ... there are numbers between the ratios. The world was not ready for this, and I think he was right. It has confused mathematicians, uh, v- very seriously, because these numbers are not values, they're functions. And so you can calculate these functions to a certain degree of approximation, but you cannot pretend that pi has actually a value. Pi is a function that would-

   28. LFLex Fridman40:18

       Generates-

   29. JBJoscha Bach40:19

       ... approach this value-

   30. LFLex Fridman40:20

       Right.
8. 51:42 – 1:00:01

   Boston Dynamics

   1. JBJoscha Bach51:42

   2. LFLex Fridman51:42

      Okay, so let's go there, 'cause I gotta talk to you about this. So obviously, with the case of Boston Dynamics, as you may or may not know, it's always, uh, either hard-coded or remote controlled. There's no intelligence.

   3. JBJoscha Bach51:55

      So, uh, I don't know how, how the current generation of Boston Dynamics robots works. But, uh, what I've been told about the previous ones was that, uh, it's basically all cybernetic control, which means you still have, uh, feedback mechanisms and so on, but it's not, uh, deep learning for the most part, uh, as it's currently done.

   4. LFLex Fridman52:13

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JBJoscha Bach52:13

      It's, um, for the most part just identifying a control hierarchy that is, uh, congruent to, uh, the limbs that exist and the parameters that need to be optimized for the movement of these limbs, and then there is a convergence progress. So, it's basically just regression that you would need to control this. But again, I don't know whether that's true. That's just what I've been told about how they work.

   6. LFLex Fridman52:31

      We have to separate several levels of discussions here. So, the only thing they do is pretty sophisticated control, no, with no machine learning-

   7. JBJoscha Bach52:40

      Mm-hmm.

   8. LFLex Fridman52:40

      ... in order to be, uh, to maintain balance or to right itself. It's a control problem, in terms of using the actuators to, when it's pushed or when it steps on a thing that's uneven, how to always maintain balance.

   9. JBJoscha Bach52:55

      Yes.

   10. LFLex Fridman52:55

       And there's a tricky, like, set of heuristics around that. But, uh, that's the only goal. Everything you see Boston Dynamics doing, in terms of that to us humans is compelling, which is any kind of, um, higher order movement, like turning, uh, wiggling its butt, uh, like, uh, you know, uh, j- jumping back on its two feet, dancing. Dancing is even worse, because dancing is hard-coded in. It's, um, it's choreographed by humans. There's choreography software. So, like, there is no... of all that high level movement, there's no anything that you can call, certainly can't call AI. But there's no, uh, even, like, basic heuristics. It's all hard-coded in. And yet, we humans immediately project agency onto them, which is, which is fascinating.

   11. JBJoscha Bach53:48

       So, the, the gap here is, uh, it doesn't necessarily have agency. What it has is cybernetic control. And the cybernetic control means you have a hierarchy of feedback loops that keep the behavior in certain boundaries, so the robot doesn't fall over, and it's able to perform the movements. And the choreography, uh, cannot really happen with motion capture, because the robot would fall over, because the physics of the robot, the weight distribution and so on, is different from the weight distribution in the human body. So, if you were, uh, using the directly motion captured movements of a human body to project it into this robot, it wouldn't work.

   12. LFLex Fridman54:22

       Mm-hmm.

   13. JBJoscha Bach54:22

       You can do this with a computer animation. It will look a little bit off, but who cares? But it, uh, if you want to correct for the physics, you need to basically tell the robot where it should move its limbs-

   14. LFLex Fridman54:33

       Mm-hmm.

   15. JBJoscha Bach54:33

       ... and then, uh, the control algorithm is going to approximate a solution that makes it possible within the physics of the robot.

   16. LFLex Fridman54:40

       Mm-hmm.

   17. JBJoscha Bach54:41

       And you have to find, um, the basic solution for making that happen, and there's probably going to be some regression necessary to, uh, get the control architecture to, to make these movements.

   18. LFLex Fridman54:51

       But those two layers are separate.

   19. JBJoscha Bach54:52

       Yes.

   20. LFLex Fridman54:52

       So, the, the thing... the higher level instruction of what-... how you should move and where you should move is a higher-level-

   21. JBJoscha Bach54:59

       Yeah, so I expect that the control, uh, level of these robots, at some level, is dumb. This is just the-

   22. LFLex Fridman55:04

       Yeah.

   23. JBJoscha Bach55:04

       ... the physical control movement, the motor architecture.

   24. LFLex Fridman55:07

       Mm-hmm.

   25. JBJoscha Bach55:07

       But, uh, it's a relatively smart motor architecture. It's just there-

   26. LFLex Fridman55:10

       Mm-hmm.

   27. JBJoscha Bach55:10

       ... there is no high-level deliberation about what decisions to make necessarily.

   28. LFLex Fridman55:14

       Yes.

   29. JBJoscha Bach55:14

       Right? So-

   30. LFLex Fridman55:14

       But, see, it doesn't feel like, um, free will or consciousness.
9. 1:00:01 – 1:10:30

   Engineering consciousness

   1. LFLex Fridman1:00:01

      I don't see where, uh, the, uh, awareness that we're aware... The- the hard problem doesn't feel like it's solved. I mean, there, there, there, it is, it's called a hard problem for a reason because it seems like there needs to be a major leap.

   2. JBJoscha Bach1:00:19

      Yeah, I think the major leap is to understand how it is possible that a machine can dream, that the physical system is able to create a representation-

   3. LFLex Fridman1:00:29

      Yeah.

   4. JBJoscha Bach1:00:29

      ... that the physical system is acting on and that is spun force and so on. But once you accept the fact that you are not in physics, but that you exist inside of the story, I think the mystery disappears. Everything is possible in a story.

   5. LFLex Fridman1:00:41

      We exist inside the story, okay, so the machine-

   6. JBJoscha Bach1:00:43

      Your consciousness is being written into the story.

   7. LFLex Fridman1:00:45

      Yeah.

   8. JBJoscha Bach1:00:45

      The fact that you experience things is written to the, the story. You ask yourself, "Is this real what I'm seeing?" And your brain writes into the story, "Yes, it's real."

   9. LFLex Fridman1:00:53

      So, what about the perception of consciousness? So, to me, you look conscious. So, um, the illusion of consciousness, the demonstration of consciousness, uh, I ask for the-... the legged robot, how do we make this legged robot conscious? So, there's two things, and maybe you can tell me if they're neighboring ideas. One is actually make it conscious, and the other is make it appear conscious to others. Are those related?

   10. JBJoscha Bach1:01:25

       Uh, let's ask it from the other direction. What would it take to make you not conscious? So, when you are thinking about how you perceive the world, can you decide to, uh, switch from looking at qualia to looking at representational states? And it turns out you can.

   11. LFLex Fridman1:01:44

       Yeah.

   12. JBJoscha Bach1:01:44

       There is a particular way in which you can look at the world and recognize its machine nature, including your own, and in that state, you don't have that conscious experience in this way anymore. It becomes, uh, apparent as a representation. Everything becomes opaque. And I think this thing that you recognize everything as a representation, this is typically what we mean with enlightenment states.

   13. LFLex Fridman1:02:08

       Mm-hmm.

   14. JBJoscha Bach1:02:09

       And-

   15. LFLex Fridman1:02:09

       Yeah. So, it's the meditation of it.

   16. JBJoscha Bach1:02:10

       ... it can happen on the motivational level, but it, you can also do this on the experiential level and the perceptual level.

   17. LFLex Fridman1:02:16

       See, but then I can come back to a conscious state. I, okay, I particularly... I'm referring to the social aspect, that the demonstration of consciousness is a really nice thing at a party, when you're trying to meet a new person. (laughs) It's a, it's a nice thing to, to, to know that they're conscious, and they can, um... How, I don't know how fundamental consciousness is in human interaction, but it seems like to be at least, uh, an important part. And I me- I ask that in the same kind of way for robots, you know? In order to create a, a rich, compelling human-robot interaction, it feels like there needs to be elements of consciousness within that interaction.

   18. JBJoscha Bach1:03:02

       Uh, my cat is obviously conscious, and, uh, so my cat can do this party trick. She also knows that I am conscious. We're able to have feedback about the fact that we are both acting on models of our own awareness.

   19. LFLex Fridman1:03:14

       The question is, how hard is it for a, uh, the robot, artificially created robot to achieve cat-level in st- uh, party tricks?

   20. JBJoscha Bach1:03:24

       Yes. So, the issue for me is currently not so much on how to build a system that creates a story about a robot that lives in the world, but to make an adequate representation of the world.

   21. LFLex Fridman1:03:36

       Hmm.

   22. JBJoscha Bach1:03:36

       And the model, model that you and me have is a unified one. It's ver- one where you basically make sense of everything that you can perceive. Every feature in the world that, uh, enters your perception can be relationally mapped to a unified model of everything.

   23. LFLex Fridman1:03:51

       Mm-hmm.

   24. JBJoscha Bach1:03:51

       And we don't have an AI that is able to construct such a unified model yet.

   25. LFLex Fridman1:03:56

       So, you need that unified model to do the party trick?

   26. JBJoscha Bach1:03:58

       Yes. I think that, uh, you, it doesn't make sense if this thing is conscious, but not in the same universe as you-

   27. LFLex Fridman1:04:04

       (laughs)

   28. JBJoscha Bach1:04:04

       ... because you could not relate to each other.

   29. LFLex Fridman1:04:06

       So, what's the process, would you say, of engineering consciousness in the machine? Like, what are the ideas here?

   30. JBJoscha Bach1:04:14

       So, uh, you probably want to have some kind of perceptual system. This perceptual system is a processing agent that is able to track sensory data and predict the next frame in the f- sensory data from the previous frames of the sensory data, and the current state of the system. So, the current state of the system is, you know, the perception, instrumental to predicting what happens next.
10. 1:10:30 – 1:19:24

    Suffering

    1. LFLex Fridman1:10:31

       Uh, but let me sneak up to the questions of consciousness a little further. So, we usually, um, relate suffering to consciousness, so the capacity to suffer. I think, to me, that's a really strong sign of consciousness, is a thing that can suffer. How, how is that useful? Suffering? And, like, in your model where you just described, which is indexing of memories and, uh, what is it? Coherence with the perception, uh, with this predictive thing that's going on in the perception. How, how does suffering relate to any of that? You know, the higher level of suffering that humans do?

    2. JBJoscha Bach1:11:16

       Basically, pain is a reinforcement signal. It ... Pain, uh, is a signal that one part of your brain sends to another part of your brain, or in an abstract sense, part of your mind sends to another part of the mind, to regulate its behavior, to tell it, "Behavior that you're currently exhibiting should be improved." And, uh, this is the signal that I tell you, uh, to, uh, to move away from what you're currently doing and push into an- a different direction. So, pain gives you a, uh, part of you an impulse to do something differently. But, uh, sometimes this doesn't work because f- uh, the training part of your brain is talking to the wrong region, uh, or because it has the wrong model of the relationships in the world. Maybe you're mismodeling yourself, or you're mismodeling the relationship of yourself to the world, or you're mismodeling the dynamics of the world, so you're trying to improve something that cannot be improved by generating more pain.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:12:07

       Mm-hmm.

    4. JBJoscha Bach1:12:08

       But the system doesn't have any alternative, so the, uh ... it doesn't get better. What do you do if something doesn't get better and you want it to get better? You increase the strength of the signal.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:12:17

       Mm-hmm.

    6. JBJoscha Bach1:12:18

       And when the signal becomes chronic, when it becomes permanent without a change in sight, this is what we call suffering. And, uh, the purpose of consciousness is to deal with contradictions, with things that cannot be resolved. Uh, the purpose of consciousness, I think, is similar to a conductor in an orchestra.

    7. LFLex Fridman1:12:35

       Mm-hmm.

    8. JBJoscha Bach1:12:35

       When everything works well, the orchestra doesn't need much of an, uh, conductor as long as it's coherent. But when there is a lack of coherence or something is consistently producing disharmony and mismatches, then the conductor becomes alert and interacts with it. So, suffering attracts the activity of our consciousness, and the purpose of that is ideally that we bring new layers online, new layers of modeling that, uh, are able to create a model of the dysregulation so we can deal with it-

    9. LFLex Fridman1:13:03

       Mm-hmm.

    10. JBJoscha Bach1:13:04

        ... and this means that we typically get higher level consciousness, so to speak, right? We get some consciousness above our pay grade maybe if we have some suffering early in our life. Most of the interesting people had trauma early on in their childhood, and trauma means that you are suffering an injury for which the system is not prepared-

    11. LFLex Fridman1:13:23

        Mm-hmm.

    12. JBJoscha Bach1:13:23

        ... which it cannot deal with, which it cannot insulate itself from. So, something breaks.And this means that the behavior of the system is permanently, um, d- disturbed in a way that, uh, some mismatch exists now in the regulation, that just by following your impulses, by following the pain in the direction which it hurts, the situation doesn't improve but gets worse.

    13. LFLex Fridman1:13:43

        Mm-hmm.

    14. JBJoscha Bach1:13:44

        And so what needs to happen is that you grow up.

    15. LFLex Fridman1:13:47

        Yeah.

    16. JBJoscha Bach1:13:47

        That... And that part that is grown up is able to deal with the part that is stuck in this earlier phase (overlapping)

    17. LFLex Fridman1:13:53

        Yeah, so it leads to growth, you're adding extra layers to, to... okay, to your cognition, uh... Let me ask you then, 'cause I gotta stick on suffering, uh, the ethics of the whole thing. So, not our consciousness but the consciousness of others. You've, uh, uh, tweeted, "One of my biggest fears is that insects could be conscious. The amount of suffering on Earth would be unthinkable." So, when we think of other conscious beings, is suffering a property of consciousness that we're most concerned about? So... (sighs) I'm still thinking about robots, how to make sense of other non-human things that appear to have the depth of experience that humans have. And to me, that means consciousness, and the darkest side of that, which is suffering, the capacity to suffer. And so I started thinking, "How much responsibility do we have for those other conscious beings?" That's where the, um, the definition of consciousness becomes most urgent, like, having to come up with the definition of consciousness becomes most urgent, is who should we and should we not be torturing?

    18. JBJoscha Bach1:15:24

        There's no general answer to this. Was Genghis Khan doing anything wrong? It depends, right, on how you look at it.

    19. LFLex Fridman1:15:31

        Well, he, he drew, he drew a line somewhere, where this is us and that's them. It's the circle of empathy. It's, like these... We don't have to use the word consciousness, but these are the things that matter to me if they suffer or not, and these are the things that don't matter to me.

    20. JBJoscha Bach1:15:52

        Yeah, but when o- one of his commanders failed him, he, uh, broke his spine and let him die-

    21. LFLex Fridman1:15:58

        Yeah.

    22. JBJoscha Bach1:15:58

        ... in a horrible way. And, uh, so in some sense, I think he was indifferent to suffering, or he was not, uh, indifferent in the sense that he didn't s- uh, see it as useful if he inflicted suffering. Uh, but he did not s- see it as something that had to be avoided. That was not the goal. The question was, how can I use suffering and the infliction of suffering to reach my goals from his perspective?

    23. LFLex Fridman1:16:24

        I, I see. So, like, different societies throughout history put different value on the, uh-

    24. JBJoscha Bach1:16:29

        And different individuals, different psyches, right?

    25. LFLex Fridman1:16:31

        But also even, uh, though the objective of avoiding suffering. Like, some societies probably... I mean, this is where, like, religious belief really helps, that, that afterlife, that it doesn't matter that you suffer or die. What matters is you suffer honorably, right? So that you enter the afterlife a- as a hero.

    26. JBJoscha Bach1:16:52

        It seems to be superstitious to me. Basically, beliefs that assert things, uh, for which no evidence exist-

    27. LFLex Fridman1:16:59

        Well-

    28. JBJoscha Bach1:17:00

        ... are incompatible with sound epistemology, and I don't think that religion has to be superstitious. Otherwise, it should be condemned in all cases.

    29. LFLex Fridman1:17:06

        Okay, gotcha. You're somebody who's saying we live in a dream world. We have zero evidence for anything. So you-

    30. JBJoscha Bach1:17:11

        That's not the case.
11. 1:19:24 – 1:23:43

    Postmodernism

    1. JBJoscha Bach1:19:24

    2. LFLex Fridman1:19:24

       Can I ask you on a small tangent, um, to talk about your, um, favorite set of ideas and, and people, which is postmodernism?

    3. JBJoscha Bach1:19:35

       (laughs) What? (laughs)

    4. LFLex Fridman1:19:38

       (laughs) What is, what is postmodernism? How would you define it and why, to you, is it not a useful framework of thought?

    5. JBJoscha Bach1:19:49

       Uh, postmodernism is- is, uh, something that I'm really not an expert on, and, uh, postmodernism is, uh, uh, for, a set of philosophical ideas that is difficult to lump together, um, that, um, is characterized by some useful thinkers, some of them poststructuralists and so on. And I'm mostly not interested in it, because I- I think that, uh, it's not leading me anywhere that I find particularly useful. It's mostly, I think, borne out of the insight that the ontologies that we impose on the world are not literally true, and that we can often get to a different interpretation by the world by using a different ontology that is different separation of the world into interacting objects.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:20:29

       Mm-hmm.

    7. JBJoscha Bach1:20:29

       But the idea that, uh, this makes the world an, a set of stories that are arbitrary, I think is wrong. And the people that are engaging in this ki- type of philosophy are working in- in an area that I largely don't find productive. There is nothing useful coming out of this. So this idea that truth is relative is not something that has, in some s- sense, informed physics or theory of relativity, and there is no feedback between those. There is no meaningful influence of this type of philosophy on the sciences or in engineering or in politics. But there is a very strong information on, uh, of this on, uh, ideology.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:21:07

       Mm-hmm.

    9. JBJoscha Bach1:21:07

       Because it basically has become an ideology that is justifying itself by the notion that truth is a relative concept.

    10. LFLex Fridman1:21:16

        Mm-hmm.

    11. JBJoscha Bach1:21:16

        And it's not being used in such a way that the, the philosophers that, or sociologists that take up these ideas say, "Oh, uh, I should doubt my own ideas, because maybe my separation of the world into objects is not completely valid and I should maybe use a different one and be open to a pluralism of ideas."

    12. LFLex Fridman1:21:33

        Mm-hmm.

    13. JBJoscha Bach1:21:33

        But it mostly exists to dismiss the ideas of other people.

    14. LFLex Fridman1:21:37

        It becomes, yeah, it becomes a political weapon, of sorts-

    15. JBJoscha Bach1:21:40

        Yeah.

    16. LFLex Fridman1:21:41

        ... to achieve, to achieve power.

    17. JBJoscha Bach1:21:42

        Basically, this, uh, there is nothing wrong, I think, with, uh, uh, developing a philosophy around this, but to, uh, develop norms around the idea that, um, truth is something that is completely negotiable is incompatible with the scientific project. And I think if, uh, the, uh, uh, if the academia has no defense against the ideological parts of, uh, the postmodernist movement, it's doomed.

    18. LFLex Fridman1:22:09

        Right. You have to acknowledge the ideological part of any movement, actually, uh, including postmodernism.

    19. JBJoscha Bach1:22:15

        Well, the question is what an ideology is, and to me, an ideology is basically a viral memeplex that is changing your mind in such a way that reality gets warped. It gets warped in such a way that you're being cut off from the rest of human thought space and you cannot consider things outside of the range of ideas of your own ideology at pos- as possibly true.

    20. LFLex Fridman1:22:35

        Right. So, I mean, there are certain properties to an ideology that make it harmful. One of them is that, like, dogmatism of just certainty, dogged certainty in- in that you're right, you have the truth, and nobody else does-

Episode duration: 3:12:21