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

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. 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.

(Russian) . (laughs)

(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?

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.

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