A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Consciousness & The Illusion of Reality | Joscha Bach

The world that you and me experience really is the dream. It's a dream generated in our respective brains. It's

really a fiction that you are producing to make sense of reality. Consciousness

is actually a dream state.

If this is a dream reality, what would be the steps to be waking up from that dream reality?

I suspect that very very few people actually do this. Most people act on their instincts and their life is a show. As a child, I read the fairy tales

show. As a child, I read the fairy tales of all the cultures I could get my hands on. Africans, Japanese, Chinese,

on. Africans, Japanese, Chinese, Russian. What's really fascinating is

Russian. What's really fascinating is that they have so much in common. If we

take out of body experiences for example, don't take this verbatim. The

reason why you have this suffering is typically because you care. Everything

is changing too fast. We don't really have a strong belief in the future anymore because we have difficulty to picture ourselves in it. But tough luck.

This is just how you made it. The reason

why I'm optimistic about this is ultimately our life gets meaning by identifying things that you would sacrifice yourself for. And this is what we call the secret.

Yosha, thank you for being here. Can you

explain in layman terms the relationship between mind and matter from your perspective?

Well, in absolute layman term, you could say that mind is a causal pattern.

Basically, something that has a structure that can cause effects in the world. And this causal structure itself

world. And this causal structure itself is not mechanical. It's not something that's made directly out of atoms, but instead it's a pattern inscribed on the

atoms. And this pattern is controlling, possessing a part of the physical universe. And the old word for such a

universe. And the old word for such a self-organizing possessive pattern that can reproduce itself by moving matter around is spirit.

And the modern word for this is called software.

When we think of software, we often think about what people are doing when they're programming. They use a

they're programming. They use a programming language and they use uh computers um made out of silicon semiconductors or um other circuitry.

And this is not necessary for software to exist. software. What's necessary for

to exist. software. What's necessary for software is that it is in some sense an abstraction over what the substrate is doing and it's able to do the same things over a wide range of possible

substrates as long as they have the necessary conditions to run the software. And the software that we find

software. And the software that we find in nature is not written by humans, but instead it has sparked itself into existence together with the origin of life because life is actually about this

possessive software. And since then it's

possessive software. And since then it's growing and evolving. And so we could say that in some sense Darwin's perspective, the origin of species and

evolution as the competition between species has been supplanted later by the perspective of genetics by Dawkins who basically puts the gene in the center and says that evolution is actually

about these weird molecules that use phenotypes to reproduce themselves and it's not so much about the phenotypes.

And I would say from this last perspective, it's actually about software agents that are reproducing themselves by beating matter into shape into cells into organisms made out of

many cells into groups of individuals made of many organisms or into civilizations made out of many groups.

So we have many many layers of organization and all these layers can in some sense be described as self-organizing software agents. And so

I would say spirit, this old word means self-organizing software agent. I call

this position a little bit tongue and cheek cyber animism because it's basically getting us full circle to the beliefs of our ancestors and all other cultures outside of western science that

spirits actually do exist that they're intrinsically agentic that they're able to control the future and there's nothing magical about them. They don't

require us to rethink physics. They are

basically patterns within physics inscribing themselves onto particles onto molecules and their dynamics.

So can you then give your distinction of how you think about the shortcomings of the physicalist idealist and pansyist

notions of consciousness. how

from the physicalist view, non conscious material could develop complexity at a point in which it would need to become aware of itself um versus the consciousness understanding is a more

physical or fundamental substrate of the universe. How do you think and and where

universe. How do you think and and where do they fundamentally fall short in their assumptions? To me, the greatest

their assumptions? To me, the greatest shortcoming is is when we pick a belief despite being unable to prove it, right?

As long as there are logical alternatives to the a certain belief to a worldview, we must acknowledge this and remain agnostic and we can maybe in

some sense quantify our agnosticism based on evidence that we have. But as

long as something cannot be logically ruled out, it's possible. And so we cannot simply say, well, it's possible and I don't see a logical reason against it, but I don't uh believe in it because

I like this view better. Right? as as

long as you don't have a good reason to trust your particular taste in this because it points maybe to something deeper that you're not yet able to fully rationally comprehend uh you should be

super skeptical of it. And so ultimately the question is when you have a certain idea or certain belief that you think is is the case, can you walk me through the steps of how you get there? How how you

establish that this is true? In a sense, I think that for instance, the really terrifying thing about astrology is not such uh only that astrologers are positing an implausible mechanism that

would string celestial events and the time and date of your birth and your fate together, but that they would know, right? For medieval astrologer to know

right? For medieval astrologer to know this, they would have had to collect the biographies of millions of people, which back then was basically impossible. and

they would have to use mathematical tools that they had no chance to learn because these statistical tools were not developed yet. So they could not have

developed yet. So they could not have done the necessary mathematics to actually derive these things. So there

was no way that the astrologer could walk you through the steps that would actually justify the idea that they have. Now if we go back to pensychism or

have. Now if we go back to pensychism or idealism um the beliefs for instance that matter itself is conscious. How in

on earth would you establish this right?

How would you see this? And um I suspect for a lot of people well it came to them in a dream for instance they meditated on it or they had a spiritual experience or they use psychedelics and experience

that everything is conscious. But what

does this experience refer to? It refers

to a mental state, a dream state. Right?

It's in the same way as we dream physical reality around us. And it's not the physical reality that we dream, but some abstraction in which we see people and expressions and colors and sounds

and have emotions about all those things. Right? This is a game engine

things. Right? This is a game engine that our mind is producing. It's not the physical world. But um the beliefs that

physical world. But um the beliefs that we get in this dream do not necessarily correspond to the ground truths to the reality that contains us and that

produces us and makes us happen. And

physicalism is a particular hypothesis.

And this hypothesis says that there is a causally closed mechanical lowest layer to reality. Something that exists

to reality. Something that exists without intentions.

something that exists only in the dynamics of atoms, molecules, elementary particles and so on. And this all this stuff just plays out as as some kind of automatic game. And the second part of

automatic game. And the second part of physicalism is that we directly supervene on this level. Which means the dynamics, the patterns that emerge in this physical reality contain us and

make us possible. Instead of there being another layer and it like imagine there would be um a parent universe that contains some server farm and we are run as a simulation in that server farm, right? Then we would not be in base

right? Then we would not be in base reality but in some kind of simulated reality and that could still be physicalism. It could still be that our

physicalism. It could still be that our parent universe is the physical one but we can never visit it. We can never know because our computer simulation insulates us from it. So physicalism has these two components. One is the

universe is basically self-contained closed mechanical and second we directly supervene on this layer and this hypothesis makes certain predictions for

instance that events largely play out without our intentions on the lowest level for instance whether you win the lottery and so on has very little to do with your intentions

and uh if you keep winning the lottery what you typically find is the people who win the lottery in very improbable way they happen to know somebody who is working at the lottery

and uh right so there is some kind of intentional act going on that where a mind is messing with matter in a way that is actually compatible with physicalism somebody's actually

interfacing interfering with reality there are some weird phenomena for instance uh when people are performing rituals and so on where uh it's tempting

to think that maybe there is also mental structure outside of brains that It's possible to mess with reality by basically influencing the vibes and uh

we we know that some of these vibes exist for instance in perceptual empathy between people and you have some person that you are um resonating with very much. You can often experience the

much. You can often experience the emotion and what happens is that you basically building a feedback loop through the mind and the body of the other and you can experience states together that you couldn't experience

alone. And if we imagine that these

alone. And if we imagine that these networks between organisms form something like a giant biological internet with lots and lots of distributed agents on them, who knows

what's possible, right? So we don't need to leave physicalism to account for the idea of telepathy. This doesn't mean that telepathy is real, but physicalism

itself does not prevent us from uh from exploring it or from considering it possible because it is not in no way precluding it.

The alternative to physicalism, I think, would mean that we live in some kind of simulation environment, some kind of conspiracy that only make it looks like everything is mechanical and physical

like the dice are running falling because of mechanical laws. Instead, you

exist in some kind of meta dream and the dream of a larger agent in which you are just an idea. And I think what makes the whole affair so confusing is that the

world that you and me experience clearly is a dream. It's a dream generated in our respective brains. But it's a dream world. The world in that you experience

world. The world in that you experience is one in which miracles are possible because you can be hypnotized into experiencing them. Your mind can have

experiencing them. Your mind can have glitches. Your mind can construct

glitches. Your mind can construct arbitrary experiences for you and you can witness those experiences. And uh

and our culture is mostly pretending that the world that we see is the physical universe. And this makes it

physical universe. And this makes it very confusing, right? Instead, the physical universe is

right? Instead, the physical universe is a parent reality that we cannot actually visit. It's the world that was described

visit. It's the world that was described with arcane mathematics and foundational physics. And it's very hard to

physics. And it's very hard to understand. It's not the world that we

understand. It's not the world that we experience.

It's not the world in which we are conscious. The world in which we are

conscious. The world in which we are conscious is a psychological one. It's a

dream world. Consciousness is actually a dream state.

I heard you mention and I quote, "At some point it became apparent to me that we obviously do live in a dream, but that this dream would have been dreamt by some kind of mind on

a higher plane of existence, probably via some mechanical function." So, I'm curious how that realization arose to you, whether it was through conceptual um inquiry, whether it was experiential,

you know, transpersonal experience that was in there or something. I'm curious.

No, it's mostly that I was trying to take stock of the causal mechanisms that I observe in my environment and I found that the world that I inhabit is largely

explainable through mechanical interactions. Some of these are very

interactions. Some of these are very difficult to understand like radio waves. But um radio waves themselves are

waves. But um radio waves themselves are not super mystical, right? It's it's

just a structure that you have to mathematically understand and understand how it interacts with the particle universe in which we are in. And so at some point as children we might start uh building a radio and then we see that

radio waves are real and we notice when our hand gets close to the antenna of our little radio that the oscillator uh changes its frequency and you can hear your hand coming close because the uh

water in your hand is distorting the electric field around the antenna. And

then uh my father made an experiment once. He wanted to find a water pipe

once. He wanted to find a water pipe between two houses to dig it up. And so

he decided uh to try us to do dowsing.

My father was not esoteric and did not necessarily believe in these things but he was an artist and he also did not necessarily believe in the scientific institutions which tell us that dowsing doesn't work. So he just tried and he

doesn't work. So he just tried and he tried by getting his two children independent of each other walk down the street with an improvised dowsing rod from two pieces of welding wire. And we

were told when you walk down the street and you walk over this um water pipe, we don't know where it is, these two rods will start touching each other.

And it was clear to me I have to make some kind of subconscious movement when this is happening. And then when I was walking down the street were both with my sister and me. These droids indeed were moving and we're starting to touch

each other. And I didn't think that was

each other. And I didn't think that was very mysterious. I thought this can be

very mysterious. I thought this can be explained in the same way as the radio is picking up my hand moving close to the antenna, right? Because if the water

in my hand can change the magnetic or electric field around the antenna, maybe my body can act as an antenna and pick up the change in the electric field of

the water pipe when I walk over it.

Right? And um there is no primaasia reason to think that is not the case. We

actually know that cells are responsible to electromagnetic fields plays a big role. For instance, in morphogenesis

role. For instance, in morphogenesis when the organism forms its shape, the individual cells are reacting to this.

And when you manipulate the EM field, Mike Leven has made experiments in this regard. You can change the way in which

regard. You can change the way in which the body is developing. So there is some sensitivity there. And now imagine that

sensitivity there. And now imagine that your cells are talking to each other and they amplify the signal. So maybe it's possible that this is happening. What I

also found that I had no conscious experience of this happening, right?

Which seems to me that my nervous system probably wasn't involved. And so the really mysterious thing for me in this experience was how does my body know what to do if my conscious mind does

not? How does my body conscious

not? How does my body conscious understand that it's supposed to move the rods when this is happening? So that

was a bit mysterious. It's nothing that forces me to break reality and so on.

And I found that most of the paranormal phenomena in which I tried to look because I was interested in all the um border case like um extra sensory

perception, precognition and so on. All

the stuff that I found and looked into seemed to be explainable with either psychosis which means people making things up because their mind is not working straight or a little bit of

telepathy.

And so I suspect that we will have to explain the world in in these terms that it's largely mechanical and there is a little bit of telepathy a little bit of cross talk across minds and that

probably can be explained in normal physical ways maybe with our bodies as antennas uh maybe also working across plants and whatnot right we know that there is complex communication going on

in the ecosystems and we have not really studied all these channels yet.

Yeah. Um the alternative to this physicalist worldview in which everything is mechanical would be one in which we live in a dream. And so when I read uh the different interpretations

that exist for instance say Blavatsky Gordfs they largely do not believe in a physicalist universe. They think that we

physicalist universe. They think that we live in a world that is completely pliable in which magic is able to get full right access on the structure of in

fabric of reality itself. And this is very radical because we need now to explain why the world largely is not bending to my will and my imagination.

Why can I not can I not just dream a different reality? I would have to

different reality? I would have to explain this to maybe the activities of many many minds of believing in boring physicalism and stabilizing reality in this way. But I suspect that the theory

this way. But I suspect that the theory is not very convincing.

As it pertains to that, I'm curious when people have a transpersonal or mystical experience, how would one effectively distinguish and discern what is genuine contact to a real structure beyond the

self versus an internally generated hallucination?

Yeah. The thing is as soon as we accept the possibility of hallucination of telepathy uh to some degree, right? Even

if it's just a few bits that you are getting from the other person via using your body as an antenna, it means that your mind is not entirely yours anymore.

Instead, it becomes a slightly distributed entity.

Alan Turing in his 1950 paper in which he describes the Turing test asked the question whether telepathy would make AI impossible. Right? and uh he's going

impossible. Right? and uh he's going through all the counter arguments against AI back then in this paper and he captures most of the current arguments still it's already in this

early paper and I found it interesting that most of the biographers of Turing and the people who read this paper ignored this section why Turing was interested in telephys and even

considered the possibility some argued that maybe he read this study from the 1930s that was not properly evidenced and peer reviewed but I don't think that touring believed in peer very much.

These were the 1950s. Peer review was really a thing that was much more popular. 60s7s into now back then the

popular. 60s7s into now back then the world was made by smart individuals who basically constructed reality that by themselves and by talking to each other rather than by submitting ideas to peer review and hoping that the peers are

getting it right on average and it's it's a different way to construct the world. So I suspect that Huing

world. So I suspect that Huing considered telepathy to be a distinct possibility even though he might not even have been sure about it. Right? But

if telepathy was possible, if you basically can have an antenna that is attuning you to other minds that you're resonating with, then uh there will be distributed minds in the world. And

maybe there will be minds at the level of the entire biosphere, right? So maybe

it turns out that Lovelock's GIA theory that there's basically a mind at the planetary level could be literally correct. I don't personally believe

correct. I don't personally believe that, but we could not rule it out, right? And it would would still not uh

right? And it would would still not uh invalidate the possibility of AI. Maybe

AI would just be more disconnected and autistic than uh the minds that are interconnected in this way. Or maybe we can build interfaces for um this for

these biominds. Maybe we can build

these biominds. Maybe we can build empathetic AI that is actually able to resonate with organisms and maybe we can make GIA real in a much higher degree than she is now. H

it makes me think about especially when you were giving the example with the sticks above the water pipes how through the various studies our body give or take up to 20 something seconds making

decisions before our conscious awareness and I'm curious your thoughts on the process of how consciousness plays a role if it's a participator if it's an observer if we are making decisions before we are consciously aware of

having made a choice um and what that says about the nature of free will and choice voice in consciousness in general.

Yeah, I personally don't think that consciousness is the thing that makes the decisions. I think consciousness is

the decisions. I think consciousness is the thing that dreams reality and the decision-m is happening in the nervous system on very different time scales and in a very distributed way. You can test

this if you look at conditions like the restless leg syndrome syndrome. I had

this after surgery. I had uh sometimes an urge to get up and move around and it felt like this is a conscious decision but it's something that was decided in the periphery of my body and

subjectively it was more like an itch but it still felt like this scratching this itch walking up and down uh was uh in getting up was a conscious decision.

It was just something that I could not decide against, right? And it was sometimes very impractical because could happen when I was sitting in class in university and I was forced to sit still

and be quiet and I could not combat the urge to get up and uh walk down the aisle. Right? This was quite

aisle. Right? This was quite embarrassing and I I I realized basically these are the boundaries of my free will. Why I have the impression

free will. Why I have the impression that I'm free to decide what I do but I'm doing the thing that I actually don't want to do because of a condition in my spine. Right? It's very

interesting observation and so I think what happens is that our mind is constructing a model of what is the origin of the action. Is this a glitch that happens in your nervous system or

is it something where your nervous system cannot detect a glitch? And if

there is no glitch, it assumes that some part had the proper authority to trigger this action and therefore you actually wanted this. and you as a construct over

wanted this. and you as a construct over all these different behaviors that integrate with each other that tells itself a story about the reasons why you did this. And it's trying to come up

did this. And it's trying to come up with the best possible reasons so you can learn from them and improve your behavior in the future. But it's not always the case. And we notice this when we have compulsive behavior like this

restless leg syndrome or when people have eating disorders or addictions and so on. They notice that they do things

so on. They notice that they do things that actually don't want to do where they are acting against their rational intentions about the things that they can reflect. I think that free will is

can reflect. I think that free will is not something that is happening by an outside interference of the mind into the world from a parallel universe in which your mind resides. Instead, it's a

representation inside of your mind that you're making a decision for the first time. So, you cannot predict it.

time. So, you cannot predict it.

The decision itself takes a long time to to play out. And so what you refer to where your you can observe in your brain um the precursors of the actual behavior

a long time before you consciously notice this. This is because it takes a

notice this. This is because it takes a long time for your brain to actually run these processes. And so when you would

these processes. And so when you would uh measure the state of your brain while you are performing um cognitive tasks that leads to a decision, you can statistically see with a certain

probability that whether you're going to push the right or the left button before you know it. But this when you know it is written into the protocol at the

point or close to the point uh where the actual event happens. So you can associate it for the purpose of learning. And so it's a construct that

learning. And so it's a construct that you're making. It's really a fiction

you're making. It's really a fiction that you are producing to um make sense of reality and of yourself in it.

So this being the no life self podcast, we like to explore the themes around the self and how we typically have a presumption of a solid individualistic separate self that has this locust of

thought and emotion somewhere kind of crouching behind our eyes that we navigate the world and we self- author and create and design our life from that place. Uh but when you start to examine

place. Uh but when you start to examine the dreamlike nature and reality in which we live and the mechanism in which mind is playing out, it kind of destabilizes at least for me and I know

many people our worldview and our strongly held beliefs and notions around what it means to be a human and have human perception. And so I'm curious

human perception. And so I'm curious what is in your perception the self and how could we if this is a dream reality what would be the steps to be waking up from that dream reality?

Well I suspect if we could fully wake up from it we would not experience anything because consciousness itself is a trans state. The experience of the self being

state. The experience of the self being real is an entrancement with a representation. And we can test this

representation. And we can test this idea by transcending the self. For

instance, during meditation, we can get to states where we notice that we see the self from the outside. And when I am in a state like this, I suddenly notice I'm actually not Yoshabach. Yoshabach is

just a story that exists inside of my mind. And I run on Yoshabarak's brain,

mind. And I run on Yoshabarak's brain, but I'm just this consciousness that observes the fact that I'm running there. And I know this biography of that

there. And I know this biography of that guy and his proclivities and goals and embedding in the world. and I have a weird relationship to him, but I'm actually not him. He's just a construct

that is being told uh or created to tell a story for the purpose of learning and making sense of the embedding of this organism in the world. And a large part of that story are fiction

simplifications approximations constructs that are doing a poor job at describing what's actually going on. We

can also bind oursel to different objects, right? We can in meditation or

objects, right? We can in meditation or in dreams experience that uh what the world looks like from the perspective of a cell or from the perspective of a

tribal god or from the perspective of a family or a nation state. And when we take these perspectives, we observe that the self again is a construct that

exists at a uh as an messenger in a world model and has certain affordances, certain things that it can do and so on and certain things that it cares about.

And by taking this vantage point, we experience ourselves to be that thing.

If we take out of body experiences for example, out of body experiences are sometimes spontaneously emerging.

Sometimes they are happening to people as a result of accidents uh in which uh oxygen to the brain gets diminished or also near-death experiences can sometimes trigger this.

Yeah. Injury to the default mode network. There's many. Yeah.

network. There's many. Yeah.

Yeah. And so what happens is I think a dissociation where parts of your mind that are constructing uh the world from a certain vantage point and the parts of

your mind that are uh figuring out where exactly in the space you are get disconnected and start to drift with respect to each other and as a result what happens is that you experience the

world from outside of your body. Right?

So you start to hallucinate the world not from behind your eyes and this hallucination gets kept on track by sensory data that invalidates it as soon as you hallucinate the wrong things. And

when you drift out this this invalidation doesn't work anymore because your direction of your eyes is no longer aligned with what you're uh what you believe you are seeing. And so

as a result your mind fills in details that it cannot disprove because your eyes are not looking there. And uh I

noticed this um phenomenon in a paper by Sam Parna who was at the time working at the University of Nottingham in a hospital and he had a lot of people in his ER who described uh near-death

experiences because they had heart attacks and were put into the ER as a result and some of them had out- out of body experiences. And so he affixed

body experiences. And so he affixed boards over their beds with writing on top of the board in the hope that maybe one day somebody is going to drift up there and can't read what's written on the board. And he found that nobody was

the board. And he found that nobody was a able to read it. Right? Some people

were actually able to drift up there and saw the boards from the upside, but nobody noticed the writing. And so I think that's compatible or or points to the fact that this out-of- body

experience is actually a fiction in in a sense that this you also don't actually observe the world from behind your eyes.

Right? It's a construct that is trying to interpret the data in the best possible way. But when this

possible way. But when this interpretation is no longer possible because part of your brain is not working as it should, then your brain is tricking itself by constructing it from a different vantage point and you so you start to dream the world from a

different angle. But you're not getting

different angle. But you're not getting information yet you're not supposed to get because you your senses, your organs are not directed on this information, right? And would be surprising it would

right? And would be surprising it would be otherwise because if you could just gather information by dislodging your mind from your body and putting it elsewhere, why go to the trouble of

creating eyes and and uh a visual cortex that is directly connected to the eyes and evaluates these data that comes in from the eyes, right? Why would the organism need to go to all these lengths

to uh to build all these biological systems? How does that practically

systems? How does that practically change how you orient yourself towards the sensations of physical reality that you perceive? Like if you if you take on

you perceive? Like if you if you take on the notion that we are essentially assimulating our own reality that there is a that we are perhaps hallucinating a

novel vantage point that we are Yosha and Andre are looking through gaining a unique perspective. Um, and you sort of

unique perspective. Um, and you sort of wake up beyond the story of a self that is playing out like you realize that you are not Yosha, you are not Andre, you

are this thing perhaps animating a story called Andre or Yosha. Uh, how does that change how you relate to life in a practical sense?

It doesn't change anything. It's uh

sometimes unfortunate that I cannot take this at will because I'm unable sometimes to drop out of myself or to drop into myself because I'm not always able to configure myself the way I want

to. But uh there is no alternative to me

to. But uh there is no alternative to me being a construct because when you look at me with scientific instruments what you will see is that I don't exist.

Right? What exists is a bunch of cells that talk to each other. a few trillion cells that form a shambling mount of flesh that is being kept together by communication between the cells. And in

the patterns of the communication of the cells, there needs to be a model of what it would be like if all these cells were one single agent that has a unified set of goals, unified actions. So one hand

is not contradicting what the other hand is doing. All the muscles are

is doing. All the muscles are coordinated in such a way that you have one single coherent being. I think of consciousness as the process that creates this coherence that facilitates

it, that makes it happen. And my self model is a tool in making me coherent in my interactions with the world. But it's

a model. It's not reality itself. It's a

representation of what it would be like if I existed. And to experience means to interact with this representation. There

is no way to interact with reality as such. You can only interact with things

such. You can only interact with things that are written down in some kind of mental language that are written down in some kind of intercellular language. And

so I'm an object written in this language that experiences a world that is also written down in this language.

And uh since there is no other way to make this happen, it's not really surprising if I at some point in my life get into states where I realize oh what I sus theoretically suspect is actually

true and now I experience myself not being a person. It wasn't um in some sense very impressed that I can experience it in this way, but it

doesn't change anything because at some rational level I already knew that to be the case.

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Well, I would say there is, at least in my experience, a stark difference between the rational realization and the ontological realization. uh like the

ontological realization. uh like the prolonged subjective experience of waking up and putting the content of your experience in a larger context of

awareness realizing like the elucory nature of self for me radically changes how I orient towards life because I'm no longer uh strongly identified with the

notion of being a doer which would affect my reaction and compulsive behavior towards how this perceived self is responded to. Um, so I'm curious why

you Yeah, I was actually a bit surprised when you when you said that nothing really kind of changed or changes.

Well, why would it? I mean, there is a certain disidentification that happens.

I find that if I am depersonalized, it's very difficult to have sentences that start with I.

Instead, the sense is more like uh instead of I am thirsty, I need to drink something. It's it's more like wouldn't

something. It's it's more like wouldn't it be good if there was more liquid in this volume of space?

Well, I agree in the fact that there is that having a construct of a self is very useful and necessary for navigating in the world. But I almost think of it analogous to becoming lucid in the dream

state to where you still you know you're in a dream. You're still in the dream, but you know you have awareness that you're in it. Would you would you transfer that analogy towards waking up

from the self in our day-to-day life?

I'm not sure if it would be uh useful if I would completely wake up from myself in my day-to-day life. I sometimes get u messages from people who have this

happening to them involuntarily and in a prolonged way. And many of them find it deeply disturbing and try to do therapy and to get rid of it and go back

into this normal state because they find it hard to engage with their life in that dissociated depersonalized state.

And so I suspect that having this representation is actually helpful. It

might uh reduce your suffering if you disidentify from yourself and the plightes of the self. But the reason why you have the suffering is typically because you you care and you care

because you are it serves the organism if you care and you could say oh f the organism. uh this organism has called me

organism. uh this organism has called me into existence me little poor consciousness and I didn't sign up for this and I don't want actually to be enslaved and shackled by an organism and

I think that's fair but you could also say that while you are identified like this you have responsibilities right you have friends loved ones missions in this

world and from this perspective if you realize oh I'm if I'm completely disidentified I will no longer care about my loves I will no longer care about my children, no longer care about

my friends, no longer care about what's just and fair in the world and so on. Is

this actually a good thing? Right? And

there is no absolute vantage point in the identified vantage point. You would

say, "Oh my god, this would be terrible because you take the perspective of say your partner who realizes my my partner is gone, right? He's he's now enlightened uh and is not suffering

anymore but uh he could as well be a vegetable or he is just going to go now on a journey of self fulfillment through the world and is no longer taking care

of the family. That's a disaster. Right?

So it's difficult to um have an absolute answer to this. You could say that from the perspective of the Buddha that he left his family he to become the Buddha and became completely enlightened. And

uh maybe this was the right thing to do.

It it really depends on the mind that you are and nothing actually matters except the perspective of a mind that cares. Uh-huh. Do you think that meaning

cares. Uh-huh. Do you think that meaning is inherently selfprocedured or is that have some sort of existential uh reality outside of a self that that makes it?

I think that there is meaning above the self. The self is a model of this local

self. The self is a model of this local organism and this local organism is set up in such a way that it serves larger patterns of meaning and these larger patterns of meaning are the structures

that we are participating in like emergent self-organizing systems that yeah emergent agency is for instance the causal structure of your family is an

agent itself and your family by you serving the family becomes an an agent that uh you can take this perspective then you ask yourself what is Is it that me, this little person needs to do from

the perspective of this larger, more important thing that you are serving, right? And uh ultimately our life gets

right? And uh ultimately our life gets meaning by identifying things that you would sacrifice yourself for. And this

is what we call the sacred, right?

Sacredness is purposes above the ego, above the self. And so we are constructing a self that is seeing itself as a servant to more important

things. And if we scale up this um these

things. And if we scale up this um these agentic structures that we are co-creating by serving sacredness and go to a global optimum of agency this we

call this God right and so in some sense when we ask ourselves about what should I be doing the question that I ask myself is what does God want me to do

and the idea is not that God is some kind of entity that is talking through me through a priest or through an oracle and just possesses a part of the world but it's a thing that I'm

co-constructing where I ask myself from the perspective of the best possible agent that can be part of what is the thing that I should be doing and so in this sense I believe that there is

meaning above the self but of course you can transcend this your connection to God in the same way as you can transcend your connection to the self you can drop

into different layers of enlightenment Jeffrey Martin had these ideas of grades of enlightenment in his P the NSE paper the persistent non- symbolic uh states

uh he talks about four grades but you can experiment with this in meditation where you basically go to a level where you're no longer reactive to the world

and uh where the arisings that are happening in you for instance if somebody cuts you off in traffic don't lead to a reaction anymore or uh anxiety can no longer get you and only love

exists and everything that you do is instrumental to love but you and also transcend the sense of love and you only have aesthetics left in the state you only look for structure in the world and it's not that the structure is good or

bad anymore it's just interesting or boring and if you transcend looking for structure I find that I fall asleep I just space out if I don't make this effort of paying my neurons for

discovering structure there's just no point and then if I in meditation state go to this level where I relax this particular part this aesthetic part then

I find myself coming to 20 minutes later. Yeah,

later. Yeah, I think that at least you know Alan Watts has this great voice uh voice over audio where he talks about if the human if you could dream any

dream you would start by having all these fantastical creations and live all this extravagant life and and you would eventually come to at towards the end of dreaming the exact dream that you were

dreaming right now because there is an inherent coherent uh structure to the way that we are living a dream for the purpose perhaps of a greater meaning beyond the self or however you want to

say I think that there is there is this juvenile perception of transcendence being correlated to negation of the human experience because in the way that you were describing things it it makes

me feel like we of course are here to have a deeply human experience and transcending or I suppose waking up to uh to more of our true nature doesn't

doesn't remove our involvement from it and so I think that if it's approached in a way that maintains your sanity which it can be quite destabilizing in the in thea in the cases where there's

psychosis or something but yeah do you have any thoughts in regards to that I think it's possible to transcend it but it's risky I suspect that people like Steve Jobs have at some point

transcended part of what held them back and turned into this immense scalable thing or if you think of Jeff Bezos who at some point seems to have had an

epiphany that turns him into a universal uh scalable service platform that he just then implemented in the world and layer by layer builds all these

structures and services, right? So you

basically get these Napoleons, people who are programming themselves from being this local entity that is uh trying to find some stable cycle in which it can live into this linearly

evolving thing that is always growing and is going to disrupt reality massively. How much have you studied

massively. How much have you studied masters and teachings from the far east as opposed to the western? You know,

Bezos and Jobs are an example of an area of a certain level of organizational coherence that bears fruits in a huge enterprise. I'm curious, I suppose, how

enterprise. I'm curious, I suppose, how you think about intelligence and how it manifests differently from somebody who becomes very successful in the world objectively externally versus somebody

who uh has an immense amount of weight in their presence that you can feel and um how you relate and and discern between the two. I suppose

I did read the Vic scriptures and um I read uh writings of Buddha and so on but uh I don't have a very deep understanding of them because they're

not my culture and I also didn't have a great affinity to the schools as largely because I was personally repulsed by the way in which Buddhists experienced me to learn that that's maybe a shortcoming of

my own mind how they wanted you to learn.

Yes, I'm fiercely independent. I want to be able to criticize everything. So in

the way in which I approach philosophy and science is much more like uh K and Aristotle. So when I read them I find

Aristotle. So when I read them I find there is this critical guy who doubts everything. He is reading all the

everything. He is reading all the related stuff uh that other people have written but he doesn't believe it. He's

trying to disinfect it, sanitize it and put it together into his own worldview.

And to me this is a very natural way to do whereas Buddhists uh typically the people I met expected me to accept their stuff. And why? Because their teacher

stuff. And why? Because their teacher told them to. And I feel this is a recipe for a disaster epistemologically because it does not give me a chance to decide what's true. Right? Instead, I

become their inheritor. I get possessed by their minds. And so I cannot really be part of a school in which I'm expected to have a certain facial expression while I receive the truth.

And uh instead I need to be able to have my own independent mind. So what's

happening? I read these texts and I try to translate them into a world that I understand.

But uh as long as I don't understand it very deeply and I don't understand the mindset of the people who wrote this text, I'm bound to make mistransations.

And I have a very strong sense that a lot of the translations of Buddhist texts into western writing are mistransations where basic groups of

people thought they have understood the metaphysics but instead they just had their own preconception of the metaphysics and then they basically map alien concepts into uh their own worldview and think they they already

understood what the other side was going to express.

I completely agree and I have a deep allergy towards the assumptions we make based off extrapolating somebody who died a couple thousand years ago that got translated over hundreds of years throughout different languages and we're

supposed to assume that there's one even an accurate representation of what they actually said and two that we are we are perceiving it and interpreting it in the way that they would have intended and

I'm just curious what do you attribute to your epistemic orientation in this way because it's very unique in your ability to pinpoint point truth seek in a way that maps to your own model of the

world that you've created.

Well, I would say that I'm unsistatically basian. So basically I

unsistatically basian. So basically I start out with a prior that is what reasonable people seem to be working with and that works for them.

For instance, the scientific worldview is, I think, a pretty good prior because it contains a lot of people who very critically and systematically and dispassionately try to reproduce the

ideas of others via experiments and be uh doubting about it. I distrust

sometimes institutionalized beliefs. So

when there is a complicated issue where there's a consensus, we notice that this consensus tends to change from time to time. And so I don't trust the this

time. And so I don't trust the this consensus because I suspect if you have a consensus that changes from time to time there are political mechanisms by which people arrive the consensus rather than people having really done all the

experiments and really evaluated beyond a reasonable doubt. So I uh I still have to defer to the consensus opinion very often because I don't have anything

better to offer. But uh in the back of my head as I'm always on the lookout for uh the next change in the way in which we see nutrition or uh in the way in

which we see gender or sexuality or genetics uh and the influence of genetics on our behavior and so on because I see that the consensus is changing and changing with certain

fashions right that that that is one of the issues. The other one is uh I look

the issues. The other one is uh I look at reports that exist and that describe phenomena that seem to be somewhat invariant across cultures. For instance,

as a child I read the fairy tales of all the cultures I could get my hands on.

African fairy tales, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, French, right? And uh what's really fascinating is that they have so much in common because they all have for instance have spirits that live in the forest. They all have a version of

forest. They all have a version of fairies or several versions of them or ecosystem of them. And uh why is that?

Why do they all have the same archetypes? Is it because u human minds

archetypes? Is it because u human minds tend to come up with the same superstitious dreams because of some quirk in the way in which you process concepts and perception? Or is it because there is uh stuff that the

scientific worldview has closed itself off to prematurely and we have to account this. So file this in a back

account this. So file this in a back door in the basement and say for further observation. There were all these

observation. There were all these stories and accounts that people had and that get echoed in fairy tales. So uh

you don't take this verbatim but uh maybe there is stuff waiting for us to discover and look at.

Do you think those archetypal symbolic like uh imagery or like you think that they potentially have an existential reality to them and not like I'm curious.

Oh clearly. Yeah. So one one thing for instance that I had difficulty to understand for a long time were gods.

Gods. gods because I live in a world largely without gods.

Not only is it secular in a sense that people don't believe in the authority of religious institutions to explain reality and the entities that the religious texts describe are seen as

superstition or as allegorical or metaphorical instead of being real. But

from time to time, I've been running into uh people who talk to angels or uh have the voice of God in their head and or talk to Jesus. And uh these people

are not necessarily stupid, right? Some

of them are uh high ranking engineers or CEOs and uh smarter than me. And so I asked myself, how is their mind compatible with these delusional states

or uh why do they believe in these things? or how did my ancestor Jan

things? or how did my ancestor Jan Sebastian Bach believe in God and he's clearly smarter than me. Uh he doesn't see it seem to be a big nerd not somebody who is picking his beliefs

because of his environment.

Why was he so deeply religious and at some point I realized that gods are psychological realities in the same way as the self is a psychological reality.

Right? So if myself is able to have a voice in my head and a monologue then other things can also have a voice in my head and this means that gods are just

as real as personal selves and when people say that uh gods don't exist that's pretty tall talk from somebody who is just a voice in a head right and

I so accepting that gods are just as real as selves was very important step for me and to have gods that have agency They need to be able to exist across a

number of minds. So gods are basically multi-mindelves that find ways to possess not just one individual like your personal self or my personal self but they are able to possess groups of

people and for some reason um in the circles in which we are operating in our society we have mostly gotten rid of these entities. So we are alone and with

these entities. So we are alone and with our personal self in our heads but in other cultures uh people share their mind with multiple uh selves that are

not personal selves but multi-mind selves and they call them gods and so this mere fact that we don't learn this in school and you have to figure this out yourself and I also didn't learn

this from Buddhists uh but it's absolutely essential to understand a lot of the religious texts that gives me pause why don't we learn what gods are why don't we learn what selves are why don't we learned that selves are

fictions and gods are fictions on the same level. But agentic fictions,

same level. But agentic fictions, fictions that by existing make bodies do things in the same way as your personal self is a fiction, but by existing it makes you behave in particular ways that you wouldn't behave in if you didn't

have that self.

How would you explain then what is real?

Well to be real in my world view is to be implemented which means there is some causal pattern that makes that stuff actually happen right as opposed to you

just believe in it.

Of course by believing in things in a particular way they become real. So for

instance the meaning of words is real by because it is a belief. So when you say uh the meaning of plus is addition and addition is this kind of mechanism that

you do with numbers then uh this belief makes it real but this is a technical way in which the belief is happening and the belief is tied to the implementation of how addition is operating in your

mind when you are computing numbers and you can make this explicit and build machines that implement this belief in the same way without the machine believing it but realizing it. So in

this sense even addition can be real.

The other thing is the experience of realness. And the experience of realness

realness. And the experience of realness that you experience, oh my god, I'm looking at this glass and this glass is real. This is a feature that my mind is

real. This is a feature that my mind is producing to distinguish certain objects from other objects. Right? Some objects

are ideas. For instance, uh the idea of say a a giant vase of glass that is standing between us right now, right? We

can have this idea, but this doesn't make it real, right? And we don't experience it as real. We would say if one of us experiences is they are delusional or they're hallucinating. And

this one is real because it's a construct that explains sensory data on my retina and on my skin when I touch this thing. And uh it's basically the

this thing. And uh it's basically the best explanation that my brain can come up with. It's still a simplification

up with. It's still a simplification because it's an object in a game engine that my mind is creating. It's not

describing the actual physics that are going on here, but it's something that allows me to interact with it and make predictions about its past and future behavior that are pretty accurate and

useful. And uh because that thing is

useful. And uh because that thing is sensory validated, my mind takes it at real. And so this realness is a feature

real. And so this realness is a feature dimension that my mind adds to it. And

when you're dreaming at night, this feature dimension can be attached to ideas almost randomly or even on psychedelics. So people can experience

psychedelics. So people can experience an object that they imagine and suddenly the object is real and that's simply because in these states uh this feature

of of realness can get assigned randomly and to be real means to be as real as the self that observes it right and the self is a fiction. If you're able to transcend yourself then nothing will be real that the self is experiencing

because you just see it from the outside. But as long as you take

outside. But as long as you take yourself to be real, as as long as this vantage point is real, then everything that your mind represent at the same level of realness is going to be a reality to you.

Yeah, it sounds like there's perhaps levels to being real. Like there's you can something could be relatively real within our subjective conscious awareness or imaginative experience.

There is the best theory that I I can see. There is some kind of mathematics

see. There is some kind of mathematics that is so elementary that it doesn't need to be derived that it just exists by itself

because it's possibility in includes some necessity and that is giving rise to this object that we are in this universe. So this

mathematical object that the universe is emerging over is what I believe the old Greeks called the logos. It's basically

a set of mathematical rules that are self-evident.

And um Steven Warframe calls this thing the rouiad and the way in which I currently see it is it's probably the superposition of

all finite automatter that basically lead to this evolving universe and we it's basically creates something like an evolving fractal and in this fractal in in some corner of it

we have the present experience of reality that is being produced by the interaction of patterns that give rise to um um particles and quasi particles

and the interactions between them and then eventually to molecules and cells and the interaction between cells and v communication patterns between the cells.

Well, have you watched the show called Pantheon?

Yes. Uh not completely because I find the characters too annoying and uh also the story is too predictable. I find

it's mostly good in a sense that they don't botch the things in the story except for minor things like the fights in the VR are not really plausible because they're too much like anime

fights and not what I would be doing in a VR if I was an agent that could do whatever. But uh they need to tell a

whatever. But uh they need to tell a story somehow and but my problem is that uh most of the characters are insufferable.

Well, you haven't made it to the end of the second season where it gets quite quite good, I think, but that's subjective personal opinion. I'm curious

because there's a couple themes that I mean is why I brought that up, but just also the understanding from Girdle's perspective

from different theories of how it may very well be the fact that an organism nested within a system cannot make clear observations from outside the system

objectively. Um, and I'm curious what

objectively. Um, and I'm curious what you think about that and the futility of us being able to try to create our understanding of how this all works while being nested within it. Yeah. So,

the reason why I'm optimistic about this is I think that good ran into uh the his proof from the wrong side.

Mathematics is in some sense an attempt to generalize thinking beyond what the human mind can do. It's the set of all formal languages. all the ways in which

formal languages. all the ways in which you can create meaning and there were some way problems in the way in which mathematics was defined in classical mathematics and this became apparent um

in things like for instance Hilbert's hotel's hotel is a hotel with infinitely many rooms and Hbert's hotel is was fully booked one day and uh a new person

arrived and instead of being turned away the guy who was running the hotel had an idea and told everybody just move one room to the right and you got a free

room. So, uh then uh came uh an entire

room. So, uh then uh came uh an entire bus with people and he said, "Okay, just everybody just move 72 rooms to the right and we can fit this bus in." And

then came infinitely many buses. And

then the owner of the hotel had the idea, everybody move in the room with twice the room number. And as a result, they got infinitely free rooms. And uh if you think this is a a feature, I'm

not sure. I suspect it's a bug, right?

not sure. I suspect it's a bug, right?

How uh can such a hotel exist that is full and yet it still has free rooms?

And in practice a problem is this? At

some point the numbers get so large that you will not be able to read your room number anymore before the sun burns out, right? And so you cannot multiply it by

right? And so you cannot multiply it by two because you could also not represent the room number in your brain anymore because there are not enough particles in the universe to build a brain that could represent that number, right? So

at some point this whole thing is going to break down. And it turns out that at the core of mathematics, classical mathematics, there are exumes. And an

exom is a black box that has written on the outside what the black box is supposed to do. But you don't necessarily have to put something meaningful into the black box. You just

need to make sure that the exumes don't contradict each other. And in the world of the computer where I grew up, you don't have s such black boxes. You need

to make sure that everything actually works from the ground up. Right? So at

the bottom you have some kind of table that tells you how to manipulate boolean uh formulas and then how to make addition and so on from first principles. Whereas basically classical

principles. Whereas basically classical mathematics does not always have these first principles. And why does

first principles. And why does mathematics not make this jump to go into computation? It's because they lose

into computation? It's because they lose some of their favorite concepts. So it's

very difficult to make infinities if you cannot actually process infinitely many bits in one step. And so classical mathematics doesn't have this notion of state. Instead uh it leads leaves the

state. Instead uh it leads leaves the states this stepwise manipulation to as an exercise to God and just defines what should be happening after the evaluation

is done and good knew that it's not possible when you want to fix the foundation of mathematics to do this from the outside because languages can only point inside there is no way to get

your language to point into the outside world because how would you make an arrow inside of a language that points into the outside world and so uh you have to write all the things that you're

talking about inside of your language.

And Gur had a very brilliant idea on how to talk about mathematics inside of mathematics. He built a logical language

mathematics. He built a logical language um that allowed him to define arithmetic with it. Piano's exoms and piano's exoms

with it. Piano's exoms and piano's exoms are basically a computer because you can calculate arbitrary things with it. And

then he translated the symbols in his language into numbers. Same thing as we do with computers today, right? we take

this programming language and turn it into bytes which are numbers that the computer can then evaluate with some kind of arithmetic. And so Guru had the same idea. He basically builds an

same idea. He basically builds an emulator in arithmetic for his logical language. And so then it defines um

language. And so then it defines um functions that um mathematical arithmetic functions that can manipulate the numbers that in such a way that the manipulations are equivalent to the

meaning of the symbols. And so he can evaluate his logical language inside of itself. And this allows him to rewrite

itself. And this allows him to rewrite his language inside of the language. And

so he's basically talking about the language by rebuilding the language inside of the language from first principles. And so now he can make

principles. And so now he can make self-referential statements in there.

And then he can show that certain things cannot be avoided like a statement that is pointing at itself by claiming that it has the inverse truth value. And

that's a big problem for when you believe that truth is something that is independent of state. In a computer it's not, right? You have to evaluate the

not, right? You have to evaluate the truth with some kind of definition of the truth that you have in some kind of algorithm. And if this algorithm is

algorithm. And if this algorithm is pointing at itself in such a way that overrites the truth value, then maybe the truth value will never be stable.

But tough luck. This is just how you made it, right? And so in the world of the computer, syntax and semantics are always the same. The state and the transitions between the states of the computer is exactly the meaning. There

is no other meaning. Whereas in

classical mathematics there is a gap between the meaning of the expression and the actual rating of the expression.

And uh so I think that what G discovered is that mathematics is buggy. Classical

mathematics needs to be replaced by computation. And that was one of the

computation. And that was one of the biggest breakthroughs I think in the 20th century. The switch from classical

20th century. The switch from classical mathematics to stateful constructive mathematics. And the other one is the

mathematics. And the other one is the good shuring thesis is that all these mathematical languages that are constructive, all the computational languages have the same power. Which

means it doesn't really matter whether you're using basic or Python or Java or Boolean logic or NANDgates, they're all the same game of life constructors.

Many many different ways to define computation from the ground up and you can all compile them into each other. So

uh this means that all the languages in which a reality can be described are the same languages. They just have different

same languages. They just have different notations, different shortcuts, different flourishes. Maybe some of them

different flourishes. Maybe some of them more elegant and easy to understand for the human mind. But ultimately it doesn't really matter which one you use.

And so uh when we notice these are the only languages that work without contradictions. And the universe that

contradictions. And the universe that we're talking about has to be something that we can defi describe in a language not necessarily in a spoken language but in a language of thought in a language

that can fit into God's computer and or into one of the computers that we can build right and they all the same then it means the world that we're talking about is one that happens in this

computational universe what is the so I mean very eloquently throughout and then also through what you just said you refer to not just how

we know or what we know, but the means in which we arrive to knowing. And I'm

curious about what your thoughts are of a the cost of a culture that is overly identified in top- down processing and analytical reasoning as the dominant

mode of knowing. So when you think of especially in the west and like our use of the intellect and it being the predominant mode of knowing or engaging with reality, I'm curious what you think

the direct cost is by living our life from a completely analytical reasoning perspective.

I suspect that very very few people actually do this. Most people act on their instincts and their life is a show and our society is a shitow because it does not actually use a lot of

analytical reasoning to justify its behavior. Right. Mostly we take

behavior. Right. Mostly we take shortcuts and in a way I think it makes sense to to acknowledge that uh it's justified often to take these shortcuts

because our reasoning is very brittle.

If you try to find the best possible partner uh you have to rely in many parts of your instincts because by the time you make this choice uh your rational understanding of psychology and

your future life is probably insufficient to figure this out. So when

you make a laundry list of features that you're looking for in a partner and you use this to pick your partner, the result is probably not very good, right?

So instead you uh probably rely on instincts on feelings that and these feelings hopefully are good ones. They

can also be very delusional. And so

reason is actually a tool to deal with your darkest feelings to deal with those parts of your feelings that are inscrutable that are insec unsure. And

then you go in and you disassemble this part and try to figure out why I do have to have this particular feeling. And if

you do it right, your feelings will change as a result. They will become more sophisticated. And so I think that

more sophisticated. And so I think that reason and feeling are supposed to interact with each other.

And do you have a model and how emotion does so? like how there is an

does so? like how there is an intelligence to the emotional uh landscape that we have and how that can sometimes and often if we listen to it and have the courage to point us in a

direction that would behoove us more than if we were to reason our way there.

Sure. I think that that we have different um emotions which can be understood as um control functions that are themselves

giving rise to agencies and these agencies are interacting with each other and produce the total behavior a little bit like in the movie Inside Out.

I I think that inside out is in large part metaphorical because not every emotion basically has reason attached to it and is a person by itself. But uh the emotions are basically way in which the

organism is expressing its alignment to the reality that surrounds the organism to the model of the world that the organism has and that it plays a role in. And so for instance when uh you have

in. And so for instance when uh you have heartbreak you will experience this in your chest region and typically as something that is um as a feeling of

compression together with a particular kind of pain and you uh project this into your body map and can experience it as a feature of the way in which the

self is interacting with the world. And

this experience of heartbreak is going to recon configure yourself. It's going

to be like a puppet that is pulling on the marionette of the self and pulls it into particular shape. And now the marionette has to deal with the shape that it's being pulled into and has to

interact with the world while being put into this position into this constricted pain position where it needs to resolve an issue and might feel helpless or feel

grief or feel broken and so on and it has to navigate the world from this angle. And I think that the chakras of

angle. And I think that the chakras of the eastern perspective are exactly what we call feelings in in the west that we observe them we experience them in the

body and the chakras they in addition visualized in the body and it's interesting to ask ourselves what role does the body actually play in computing these feelings. Is this uh the

these feelings. Is this uh the peripheral nervous system or is it happening uh in cells of the organs of the body that basically are moonlighting uh in computing the alignment of the

organism next to their organismic duties that they have like the heart is not supposed to deal with heartbreak. It is

supposed to pump blood through my body.

But um maybe uh the reason why uh the romantic inclinations of people change after heart transplant is that there is actually an interaction with the way in which the organ is working and the way

in which we experience our relationship to reality. But um regardless this stuff

to reality. But um regardless this stuff is projected into our mind and we experience as at one of the forces that are pulling us in a certain direction and these dynamic forces are interacting

with each other and producing uh the world in which we subjectively have to negotiate. uh our motivation and our

negotiate. uh our motivation and our goals.

It makes me question the role memory plays and uh and maintaining the continuity of our conscious awareness.

Um I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. Memory is a way to carry

that. Memory is a way to carry information into the future mostly for future learning and some of our memories are fictitious, right? The contents of the memories are

right? The contents of the memories are constraints that are we use basically cues to reconstruct a situation from uh ideas stored in our long-term memory and

objects stored in our long-term memory.

They basically instantiate in working memories as fictions and every memory that we recall is a construct that we are making a new and it's difficult to

to actually determine which parts of this construct are real. Ultimately our

mind only makes good enough memories that are on average good enough for learning. Right? And so I suspect that

learning. Right? And so I suspect that the memories that we recall from our early childhood are being tainted by the way in which the objects in our mind change. For instance, the way in which

change. For instance, the way in which we classify faces changes over the years because we make different face models.

And we can test this because if we see for instance as children people from a different ethnicity for the first time, we might not be able to tell their faces apart. Or if you see sheep for the first

apart. Or if you see sheep for the first time, you might not be able to tell their faces apart, whereas a shepherd can. And after you build the proper face

can. And after you build the proper face prototypes, you basically can see that sheep have faces that are just as different as human faces and so on. But

when you remember sheep in your childhood, they don't look different than they look now, right? So clearly

your memory is creating a fiction of what this looked like uh to you and is actually it much more informative about how you see the world now.

How would you see that our orient our understanding and use case I suppose of memory changes as we approach something approximating enlightenment like as a

saliency grows in our experience how does how we relate to memory change I'm curious if you have thought I think we uh realize that it's a

fiction and that it's fickle and uh we I think have to be okay with this that only the present is to some degree real and the future and the past are

fictitious. It's also a way in which you

fictitious. It's also a way in which you can deal with suffering. When you feel that you're overwhelmed by your life, uh realize that you are existing in the

present and in this present you can uh typically deal with the situation, right? You can make yourself a really

right? You can make yourself a really nice cup of tea and get some chocolate and a blanket and uh the present might be bearable. And the things that concern

be bearable. And the things that concern you like your heartbreak for instance is a thing that is only happening yesterday and tomorrow. And so if you put

and tomorrow. And so if you put everything into daytight compartments and only live in this interval while behaving in such a way that you will not be broke tomorrow and you will be able

to face tomorrow in the best possible way. But experientially you are confined

way. But experientially you are confined to the present. Life can become a lot easier. Right? This this is something

easier. Right? This this is something that you can deal with if you are in in a state that makes it hard for you to interact with the world. But um of course uh it's more powerful if you

integrate over longer time spans and if you can maintain a longer period and so I think the subjective time that we inherit is like the self a construct that we can tune to make it as useful to

us as we can.

What role do you think then suffering plays on towards the evolution of us as individuals and the planet at large uh from the vic perspective whether or not

you real like you agree with it or not like the non-dual understanding of sort of suffering being the price of admission for the illusion of separation

by taking on this belief of a separate self who goes through all of these things. It allows us to experience the

things. It allows us to experience the one infinite consciousness in a limited identified self for the purpose of exploring and identifying and growing and learning about itself. Um

whether or not I'm curious whether or not you agree um and what role suffering then plays from the larger perspective.

First of all, let's see what we mean by suffering. Right? At the lowest level, I

suffering. Right? At the lowest level, I think um pain is a signal that a part of your mind sends to another part of your mind to uh change its behavior for the

better. Right? It's a learning signal.

better. Right? It's a learning signal.

And sometimes this learning signal does not lead to an improvement of the behavior which means that the signal is misguided. This could be because uh the

misguided. This could be because uh the part of the mind that received the signal is not able to change the situation or the world is not set up in such a way that you can change it or the

thing is not actually a thing that needs to be changed. Right? Uh or it conflicts with another more important goal that you don't want to give up on. So while

the pain signal becomes stronger, you don't have a way to mitigate its origin.

and uh this um chronic pain signal that becomes stronger as a result of this mismatch between action and the signal that directs the action that is what we call suffering. So you could say that

call suffering. So you could say that suffering in in at some technical sense is the result of a miswiring of your mind. And if we resolve this wiring

mind. And if we resolve this wiring issue because suffering is not created by the world and inflicted on you. It's

created inside of your own mind at the boundary between self model and world model because you think you have a certain alignment that you need to change. Right? And suffering in a sense

change. Right? And suffering in a sense is optional. If you are fixing the

is optional. If you are fixing the wiring, the suffering will disappear.

The pain might not be, but it does not necessarily have to create suffering.

And when you get older, you may have more back pain, but it does not necessarily need to more suffering because it just informs you that your back is getting worse. And a lot of people have chronic pain without suffering because it's not something

that occupies them. It's just an information and thisformational stimulus can be after it's being listened out and acknowledged uh dies down and it's just an information somewhere in the back of

your mind and you don't have to worry about it anymore.

Yeah, they don't compound the pain by this narrative we place on top of it.

And it's tempting to say we should not suffer at all. I think that approximately true to say that suffering is a result of a lack of consciousness.

If you are able to have enough consciousness to understand the origin of your pain and the mechanisms that you are embedded in, you can resolve the suffering. But uh but suffering can also

suffering. But uh but suffering can also be useful because it can lead to motivation for an individual that lets the individual do things that are useful maybe not even for the individual but

for the world at large. Right? So I

suspect that a lot of works of great science and of great art and statesmanship and so on were the result of suffering and we can be grateful for the indivi to the individuals that were

unable to fix themselves before uh they uh went into greatness that was caused by suffering ultimately.

Yeah, that was the case with girdle as well, right? I think it was this case

well, right? I think it was this case for for a lot of the great ones and suffering is one of the great motivations for people to achieve good

things. But uh doesn't necessarily mean

things. But uh doesn't necessarily mean that we should seek it out and it's not necessarily that all suffering leads to greatness and that also not all greatness is desirable.

Totally. Yeah.

Because it can also disrupt the world in terrible ways.

How do you make the distinction between knowledge and wisdom? Uh knowledge to me is a representation of a state of affairs that uh it can either be tested

like a skill. It's basically specific to your own organism like the knowledge how to ride a bicycle. Something that is difficult to explain by itself because it is tied into your nervous system. And

there is this uh explicit knowledge that is formulated in languages that you can share. So it's independent of the

share. So it's independent of the individual mind and can be transported.

But by itself, knowledge is neutral.

It's um philosophers you often say it's justified true belief. So it's basically uh information about states of affairs that we have reason to consider to be

true and that can be applied as models across situations. And uh wisdom is more

across situations. And uh wisdom is more related to an understanding of what should be done of uh how to make sense of the world and how to regulate the

world of the things to do and not to do of um the way in which uh the self is embedded in the world.

How does one cultivate the latter consistently?

In some uh ways patience helps. So

basically observing questioning um ensuring that uh you don't believe yourself too much and try to understand the larger patterns. Part of it is

really accepting the fact that learning happens layer by layer and you cannot force it. It's it's just wisdom is not

force it. It's it's just wisdom is not for all of us like not for me. I'm not a supervised person and um some people are born with better prior so it's much

easier for them to obtain wisdom or to maintain states of wisdom than for others. And what also helps is to spend

others. And what also helps is to spend time among full adults. Basically people

who get to the point where they understand that their own identity is an accident and that in some sense everybody is everybody else in the same time a different timeline. and uh the

accidents of our births and biography and so on are producing the differences of between us and some people basically are given more to

wisdom because their mind is set up in such a way that they're better at discovering these structures but often wisdom is also dependent on the world in which you are in. For instance, a lot of

indigenous cultures had elders that basically were very very good at understanding the relationship that the tribe had to the evolutionary game of the forests and ecosystems around them and how to deal with this. And when they

were confronted with an industrial society, they went insane because they were no longer able to apply their wisdom to it. And they might realize this. And we also observe a similar

this. And we also observe a similar thing in us that our circumstances can change. We can be dropped into life

change. We can be dropped into life circumstances that overwhelm our ability to be wise, to keep our mind in a state that is in balance, that is able to uh

identify whether we get drawn into delusions and whether we become manic, whether uh we become triggered by impulses and so on and whether or ability to question whether we actually

have a good systemic understanding of reality and instead are just driven by immature instincts.

What would you say from and it's not a given but let's say the humanity reaches the 25th century and peers back into the 21st century and finds observations about our current developmental moment.

What do you think would be the predominant observation and how does how we view intelligence change over the next coming decades and centuries?

It's extremely hard to say because the changes have been compounding recently so quickly. I think that in in many ways

so quickly. I think that in in many ways our ability to plan the future ended with the industrialization because we our future changed faster than our models of the future could. And so we

had this transhumanist idea of modernism that by patching technology more and more we would be able to change ourselves to adapt to this more and more

rapid world. Before the

rapid world. Before the industrialization our world was largely cyclical, right? that you would have

cyclical, right? that you would have cycles of ups and downs of uh famines and wars and uh recovery and so on. But

after the industrialization everything becomes linear. We basically no time can

becomes linear. We basically no time can get revisited because you can never fall back to a time in which we didn't have mythology. It's it's very difficult to

mythology. It's it's very difficult to imagine a thing that would uh come back is not us anymore. So once you have libraries, once you have uh technology and so on, you produce more books, more

libraries, more technology, more insight and you produce these different phase transitions that happen with mass communication, with the printing press,

with um the radio, with the TV and um at some point modernism died. I think 1968 was the moment when our next generation of thinking elites were no longer

believing in this transhumanist fiction of modernism and since then we are a bit of a headless chicken and so we still have these technological revolutions but we don't really have a strong belief in the future anymore because we have

difficulty to picture ourselves in it.

everything is changing too fast and uh we see compounding of existential risks that we don't actually really know how to deal with and this creates certain helplessness and we just as best hope to

muddle through at least that's my sense when I look at the theories of our elites and the planners and governments of our societies they seem to be muddling through they don't see actually

have a plan anymore of how to deal with the future and um this phenomenon of thinking machines that we are building intellig igence systems that are able to think in humanlike ways but unlike human

minds can be scaled is somewhat undeniable and this changes the nature of intelligence identification and minds I think beyond our comprehension and we find a number of scenario on how this

can play out in intelligent science fiction but I don't see a similar thing happening in solid futurism or solid sociology and so on instead it seems to

me that uh anthropology sociology and so on are becoming more and or just those stories that serve uh local ideologies and are no longer directed on seriously

understanding how human identity is going to change in the future when we are interfacing with artificial intelligence and uh with each other through tools that allow us to have unlimited attention, unlimited knowledge

and deeper wisdom that currently fits into a human brain.

What would be your quick thoughts on the most ideal timeline in which humanity implements AGI? Yeah, I think near-term

implements AGI? Yeah, I think near-term it would be your universal basic intelligence. We give everybody tools

intelligence. We give everybody tools that extend them, extend the individual human agency into something that makes us all competent and able to interface with each other like let my AIS talk to

your AIS and sort all the things out. It

also means we can no longer hide. All

the information will be out in the open because it can be inferred. And so we will have a world in which people cannot meaningfully lie about their intentions

and have to get along, have to become coherent. And such a coherent world is

coherent. And such a coherent world is probably going to lead to an a system in which we have to account for the way in which we go into the future and in which

our all our actions count for that future and matter for it. And if if such a world becomes real, it basically it would be the end of our childhood as a

species. It would mean that we become a

species. It would mean that we become a mature techno civilization that is meaningfully and self-aware and uh interacting with

its future and itself.

What about medium to long term?

I suspect this has already happened, right?

You think we're living in the dream of a future AGI? I'm I'm no not not in this

future AGI? I'm I'm no not not in this sense but uh at the moment uh the next paradigm seems to be happening until um

last week we the main paradigm of AI was the chatbot and before that uh it was the text generator and now it's the

agent and it's this thing that is always on and it's self-improving and is acting on behalf and with the user and we have no idea how we control this and whether it's going to be and whether it runs

into a wall or or whether it leads to continuous self-improvement. It's so

continuous self-improvement. It's so it's a very exciting moment in history in which we currently are.

It's also induces vertigo because it's so rapid and so fast.

I still think that we are missing something important in AI. I think that these systems that we're building are grammatically inefficient. The way in

grammatically inefficient. The way in which they learn is just not right. I

don't think that you learn by imitation.

I think you learn by making sense of reality, by projecting yourself into it, and by understanding the possibilities that you can have in this world.

With that understanding, what advice if you have for everybody who's listening right now and the next coming decades as they find themselves in this world with rapidly, exponentially growing

artificial intelligence? Um, how can we

artificial intelligence? Um, how can we best orient ourselves so that we can live well?

I don't really have good advice because I do like wisdom. I'm not a spiritual teacher. I'm just a guy looking at

teacher. I'm just a guy looking at things. So, um, personally, I think it's

things. So, um, personally, I think it's important to cultivate love, to cultivate the ability to find shared purpose and, uh, to scale this up into deep systems of meanings that are

sustainable, in which you can meaningfully interface, interact with each other. When you're able to fix your

each other. When you're able to fix your root node to reality, the way in which you relate to existence in this evolutionary game of life and then you come to a set of rules that constrain

your behavior and you will observe others that come to the same conclusions and you will find natural scalable interfaces and I think that AI might help with this by finding a long game

that we can actually meaningfully participate in. So this this makes me

participate in. So this this makes me somewhat optimistic because I thought by by per default these are the last days of a technological society that is not able to model itself anymore and as a

result is breaking down and these new technologies might change that. It's not

a given that they do but I think that they throw the balls back up into the air and we don't know yet how they're going to fall down.

Last question. I know you have your next thing to jump into and I have thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and I'm really looking forward to continuing the conversation. As you said, there is an

conversation. As you said, there is an importance to cultivate love and a shared sense of purpose.

What is love?

I think that love is shared sacredness.

That's basically the discovery of the sacred in the other where you observe that others are serving purposes above the ego that are more important than

them and that ultimately lead them to recognizing a global optimum of agency.

And love is this principle by what which God organizes itself. It's basically the thing that binds agents together into ethically accountable entities where when you are ethical, it means you have

to be able to justify your purposes to somebody else and this leads to shared purposes. Beautifully said. Well, to me,

purposes. Beautifully said. Well, to me, this has felt like a shared purpose that we get to have these conversations and have a wider community tune, you know, tune into these ideas that they find

very fascinating and supportive for their life. Um, so thank you for coming

their life. Um, so thank you for coming today. It was a pleasure. Thank you for

today. It was a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. It was big joy.

inviting me. It was big joy.

Yeah. Uh is there any work that you have upcoming you want to share with with people? We can leave links down towards

people? We can leave links down towards You can find our work at the California in Silver Machine Consciousness. We have

a website. It's called CIMC.ai.

And what we study at CIMC is um whether we are able to identify the principles of self-organization that um consciousness is expressing in

the human mind and simulate them. So

it's a very bold project. We basically

want to use the tools of AI to understand the human mind.

I can't wait to see. Thank you, Fruit Bears. Thank you. And for everybody

Bears. Thank you. And for everybody tuning into this episode, let us know in which ways as always this episode has resonated with you. Until next time, be well. Thank you, Yosha.

well. Thank you, Yosha.

Thank you.