Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans | Lex Fridman Podcast #392

There is a certain perspective where you might be thinking what is the longest possible game that you could be playing. A short game is, for instance, uh, cancer is playing a shorter game than your organism. It's... Cancer is an organism playing a shorter game than the regular organism. And because the cancer cannot procreate beyond the organism, um, except for some infectious cancers, like the ones that eradicated the Tasmanian devils, uh, you, uh, typically end up with a situation where the organism dies together with the cancer. Because the cancer has destroyed the larger system due to playing a shorter game. And so ideally you want to, I think, build agents that play the longest possible games. And the longest possible games is to keep entropy at bay as long as possible by doing interesting stuff.

The following is a conversation with Joscha Bach, his third time on this podcast. Joscha is one of the most brilliant and fascinating minds in the world, exploring the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and computation. And he's one of my favorite humans to talk to about pretty much anything and everything. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's Joscha Bach. You wrote a post about levels of lucidity. "As we grow older, it becomes apparent that our self-reflexive mind is not just gradually accumulating ideas about itself, but that it progresses in somewhat distinct stages." So there's seven of the stages. Stage one, reactive survival, infant. Stage two, personal self, young child. Stage three, social self, adolescence, domesticated adult. Stage four is rational agency, self-direction. Stage five is self-authoring. That's full adult. You've achieved wisdom. But there's two more stages. Stage six is enlightenment. Stage seven is transcendence. Can you explain each, or the interesting parts of each of these stages? And what's your sense why there are stages of this, uh, of lucidity, as we progress through life, in this too-short life?

This model is derived from concept by the psychologist Robert Kegan, and he talks about the development of the self as a process that happens in principle by some kind of reverse engineering of the mind, where you gradually become aware of yourself, and thereby build structure that allows you to interact deeper with the world and yourself. And I found myself using this model not so much as a developmental model. I'm not even sure if it's a very good developmental model, because I saw my children not progressing exactly like that. And, um, I also suspect that you don't go through these stages necessarily in succession, and it's not that you work through one stage and then you get into the next one. Sometimes you revisit them, sometimes stuff is happening in parallel. But it's, I think, a useful framework to look at what's present and the structure of a person and how they interact with the world and how they relate to themselves. So, uh, it's more like a philosophical framework that allows you to talk about how minds work. And at first, when we are born, we don't have a personal self yet, I think. Instead, we have an attentional self, and this attentional self is initially, in the infant, tasked with building a world model, and also an initial model of the self. Mostly it's building a game engine in the brain that is tracking sensory data and uses it to explain it, and in some sense, you could compare it to a game engine like Minecraft or so, so colors and sounds, um, people are all not physical objects. They're a creation of our mind at a certain level of, of course, training. Models that are mathematical, that use, uh, geometry and, um, that, uh, use manipulation of objects and so on to create scenes in which we can find ourselves and interact with them.