E181 - Joscha Bach: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Consciousness & The Illusion of Reality

Joscha Bach explores the nature of consciousness, free will, and reality through the lens of computation, cognitive science, and philosophy. Rather than treating the mind as a mystical entity, Joscha frames consciousness as a constructed dream—a model generated by the brain to make sense of the world and coordinate behavior. We examine why beliefs should remain provisional, how the self functions as a useful fiction, and why suffering emerges when internal learning signals misfire. Joscha explains why free will feels real even if decisions arise before awareness, how meaning exists beyond the individual ego, and why wisdom is not simply knowledge but the ability to orient oneself within larger systems of value. BON CHARGE - 15% off red light therapy products I personally use https://www.boncharge.com/knowthyself [Code: KNOWTHYSELF] André's Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list ___________ 00:00 Intro: Josha Bach 04:24 Agnosticism, Evidence, and Logical Alternatives 11:20 Reality as a Mental Simulation 13:00 What Physicalism Actually Claims 16:55 Telepathy, Rituals, and Distributed Minds 19:45 Consciousness Does Not Make Decisions 22:55 Free Will as a Post-Hoc Story 24:00 Consciousness as a Trance State 26:00 Meditation and the Illusion of Self 29:10 Out-of-Body Experiences Explained 31:07 Ad: BON CHARGE 36:30 Why the Brain Fills in Missing Reality 39:50 Dreams, Selves, and Narrative Identity 43:20 Intelligence, Models, and World-Building 47:10 Why Reality Feels Stable 51:00 Meaning, Agency, and Mental Compression 55:10 Why Consciousness Feels Central (But Isn’t) 59:30 The Psychological World vs Physical Reality 1:04:10 Intelligence Without Awareness 1:08:45 The Cost of Believing the Self Is Real 1:13:30 Waking Up From the Narrative 1:18:40 What a Cognitive Science View Really Implies 1:23:30 Final Thoughts: Living Inside the Dream ___________ Episode Resources: https://www.cimc.ai/ https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcast https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The world that you and me experience really is a dream. It's a dream generated in our respective brains. It's really a fiction that you are producing to a big sense of reality. Consciousness is actually a dream state.

• 0:10André Duqum?

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

• 0:15Speaker 00

  It's a great idea. Very few people actually do this. Most people act on their instincts and their life is a shitshow. As a child, I read the fairy tales of all the cultures I could get my hands on. African, Japanese, Chinese, 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 sacred.

• 1:03André Duqum?

  Yoshio, thank you for being here. Can you explain in layman terms the relationship between mind and matter from your perspective?

• 1:11Speaker 00

  Well, in absolute layman term, you could say that mind is a causal pattern. It is something that has a structure that can cause effects in the 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 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

• 1:55Speaker 00

  programming, they use a programming language and they use computers made out of silicon semiconductor or other circuitry. And this is not necessary for software 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 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 process of software. And since then, it's growing and evolving.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  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.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  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, the spirit, this old word, means self-organizing software agent. I call this position, a bit tongue-in-cheek, cyber-animus, because it's basically getting us full circle to the beliefs of our ancestors and all other cultural sides 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, there are basically patterns within physics, inscribing themselves onto particles, onto molecules, and their dynamics.

• 4:07André Duqum?

  So can you then give your distinction of how you think about the shortcomings of the physicalist, idealist, and pants-like 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 versus the consciousness-understanding is a more physical or fundamental substrate of the universe? How do you think? And where do they fundamentally fall short in their assumptions?

• 4:37Speaker 00

  To me, the greatest shortcoming is when we pick a belief despite being unable to prove it. As long as there are logical alternatives to 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 believe in it because I like this view better." 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, you should be super skeptical of it.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  And so, Artyom, the question is, when you have a certain idea or a certain belief, I think is the case, can you walk me through the steps of how you establish that this is true? In a sense, I think that, for instance, the really terrifying thing about astrology is not such 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. For a 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 the statistical tools were not developed yet.

• 6:04Speaker 00

  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. If we go back to penpsychism or idealism, the belief, for instance, that matter itself is conscious. How on earth would you establish this? Right? How would you see this? And 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 used psychedelics and experienced that everything is conscious. But what does this experience refer to? It refers to a mental state, a dream state. Right? And in the same way as we dream, physical reality around us. And it's not the physical reality that we dream,

• 6:49Speaker 00

  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 our mind is producing, it's not the physical world. But the beliefs that we get in this dream do not necessarily correspond to the ground truth, 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 without intentions. Something that exists only in the dynamics of atoms, molecules, elementary particles, and so on. And that all this stuff just plays out as some kind of automatic game.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  And the second part of physicalism is that we directly superwean 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 in it, like imagine there would be a parent universe that contains some server farm. And we are one, it's a simulation in the server farm, right? And we would not be in base reality, but in some kind of simulated reality. And that could still be physicalism, but 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 it from it. So physicalism has these two components. One is the universe is basically self-contained, closed, mechanical. And second, we directly superwean on this layer.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  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 if you keep winning the lottery, what you typically find is the people who win the lottery in a very improbable way, they happen to know somebody who is working at the lottery. And right, so there is some kind of intentional act going on that where the mind is messing with the matter in a way that is actually compatible with physicalism. Somebody is actually interfacing, interfering with reality. There are some weird phenomena, for instance, when people are performing rituals and so on,

• 9:03Speaker 00

  where 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 we know that some of these vibes exist, for instance, in perceptual empathy between people. When you have some person that you are resonating with very much, you can often experience their emotions. And what happens is that you're 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 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?

• 9:46Speaker 00

  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 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 makes it look 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, in the mind, dream of a larger agent in which you are just an idea.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  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 that you experience is one in which miracles are possible because you can hypnotize into experiencing them. Your mind can have glitches. Your mind can construct arbitrary experiences for you, and you can witness those experiences. And in our culture, it's mostly pretending that the world that we see is the physical universe, and this makes it very confusing. Instead, the physical universe is apparent reality that we cannot actually visit. It's the world that is described with arcane mathematics and foundational physics, and it's very hard to understand.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  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 is a psychological one. It's a dream world. Consciousness is actually a dream state.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Hey, listen.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  Power up your play with Nintendo Switch 2 and experience Link's legendary adventure, now reborn in vibrant detail on our fastest and most powerful system yet.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  And harness the power of the Ocarina with the built-in microphone.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive. Game and system sold separately. Game rated everyone 10 and up.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness.

• 12:24André Duqum?

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

• 12:49Speaker 00

  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 to mechanical interactions. Some of these are very difficult to understand, like radio waves, but radio waves themselves are not super mystical, right? It's just a structure that you have to mathematically understand and understand how it interacts with the particle universe in which we're in. And so at some point, it's children, we might start 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 changes its frequency and you can hear your hand coming close because

• 13:33Speaker 00

  the water in your hand is distorting the electric field around the antenna. And then my father made an experiment once. He wanted to find the water pipe between two houses to dig it up. And so he decided to try us to do Taoism. 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 Taoism 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 taoism rod from two pieces of welding wire. And we were told, when you walk down the street and you walk over this water pipe, we don't know where it is, these two rods will start touching each other.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  And it was clear to me, I have to make some kind of subconscious movement when this is happening. And when I was walking down the street, work both with my sister and me, these rods indeed were moving and were starting to touch each other. And I didn't think that was 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. And there is no prima facie reason to think that is not the case.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  We actually know that cells are responsible to electromagnetic fields, play a big 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 Levin has made experiments in this regard, you can change the way in which the body is developing. So there is some 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. But I also found that I had no conscious experience of this happening, 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?

• 15:42Speaker 00

  How does my body, a subconscious, understand that it's supposed to move towards when this is happening? So that was a bit mysterious. It's nothing that forces me to break reality and so on. I found that most of the paranormal phenomena in which I tried to look, because I was interested in all the border case like existential reperception, 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 these terms.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  That is largely mechanical and there is a little bit of telepathy, a little bit of cross talk across minds. And it probably can be explained in a normal physical way, maybe with our bodies as antennas, maybe also working across plants and whatnot. We know that there is complex communication going on in the ecosystems. And we have not really studied all these channels yet. 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 the different interpretations that exist, for instance, Zablawatsky, Gudieff, and so on, or the eastern traditions, they largely do not believe in a physicalist universe. They think that we live in a world that is completely pliable

• 17:08Speaker 00

  and which magic is able to get full right access on the structure and fabric of reality itself.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  This is very radical, because we need now to explain why the world largely is not bending to my will and my imagination. But can I not just dream a different reality? I would have to explain this to maybe the activities of many, many minds believing in boring physicalism and stabilizing reality in this way. But I suspect that the theory is not very convincing.

• 17:36André Duqum?

  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?

• 17:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, the thing is, as soon as we accept the possibility of hallucination, or of telepathy 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, and that 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 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

• 18:36Speaker 00

  read this paper ignore this section, why Turing was interested in telepathy and even considered the possibility. Some argue that maybe he read this study from the 1930s that was not properly evidenced and peer reviewed. But I don't think that Turing believed in peer review very much, this was in the 1950s. Peer review was really a thing that was much more popular in the 60s, 70s and into now. Back then, the world was made by smart individuals who basically constructed reality 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. It's a different way to construct the world. So I suspect that Turing considered telepathy to be a distinct possibility, even though he might not even have been sure about it, right?

• 19:20Speaker 00

  But if telepathy was possible, if you basically can have an antenna, then... Is attuning you to other minds that you're resonating with, then there will be distributed minds in the world. And maybe there will be minds at the level of the entire biosphere. So maybe it turns out that Love Lock's Gaia theory, that there's basically a mind at the planetary level, could be literally correct. I don't personally believe that, but we could not rule it out. Right. And it would, I would still not invalidate the possibility of AI. Maybe AI would just be more disconnected and autistic than the minds that are interconnected in this way. Or maybe we can build interfaces for this, for these bio-minds.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Maybe we can build empathetic AI that is actually able to resonate with organisms. And maybe we can make Gaia real in a much higher degree than she is now.

• 20:14André Duqum?

  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 twenty 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. And what that says about the nature of free will and choice and consciousness in general.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I personally don't think that consciousness is the thing that makes the decisions. I think consciousness is the thing that dreams reality. And the decision making 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. I had this after surgery. I had 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 as I said, activity is more like an itch, but it still felt like the stretching of the itch, walking up and down was getting up was a conscious decision. It was just something that I could not decide against.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  Right. And it was sometimes very impractical because I had a cabin 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 walk down the aisle. That was quite embarrassing and I realize basically these are the boundaries of my free will. But 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?

• 22:08Speaker 00

  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 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 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 noticed this when we have compulsive behavior like this, like this lag syndrome or when people have eating disorders or addictions and so on. They notice that they do things that actually don't want to do where they're acting against their rational intentions about the things that they can reflect. I think that free will is not something that is happening by an outside interference of the mind

• 22:52Speaker 00

  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.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  The decision itself takes a long time to play out. And so what you refer to, where you can observe in your brain the precursors of the actual behavior a long time before you consciously notice this. This is because it takes a long time for your brain to actually run these processes. And so when you would measure the state of your brain while you are performing cognitive tasks that leads to a decision, you can statistically see with a certain probability whether you're going to push the right or the left button before you know it. But this, when you know it, this is written into the protocol at the point or close to the point where the actual event happens. So you can associate it for the purpose of learning.

• 23:48Speaker 00

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

• 23:59André Duqum?

  So this being the No Less 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 locus 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. 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, what is, in your perception, the self? And how could we, if this is a dream reality,

• 24:44André Duqum?

  what would be the steps to be waking up from that dream reality?

• 24:48Speaker 00

  Well, I suspect if we could fully wake up from it, we would not experience anything. Because consciousness itself is a trance state. The experience of the self being real is an entranced manifestation. And we can test this idea by transcending this self, for instance, during meditation. We can get to states where we notice that we see this self from the outside. And when I am in a state like this, I suddenly notice I'm actually not Josh Abach. Josh Abach is just a story that exists inside of my mind. And I run on Josh Abach's brain, but I'm just this consciousness that observes the fact that I'm running 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,

• 25:33Speaker 00

  but I'm actually not him. He's just a construct that is being taught, 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 by describing what's actually going on. We can also bind ourselves to different objects. But we can, in meditation or in dreams, experience that what the world looks like from the perspective of a cell or from the perspective of a tribal god. 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

• 26:16Speaker 00

  that is a messenger in the world model. And that 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.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  If we take out of body experiences, for example, out of body experiences are sometimes spontaneously emerging. Sometimes they happen to people as a result of accidents in which oxygen to the brain gets diminished. Or also near death experiences can sometimes trigger this.

• 26:48André Duqum?

  Yeah, injury to the default mode network, there's many, yeah.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so what happens is, I think, a dissociation. Where parts of your mind that are constructing the world from a certain vantage point. And the parts of your mind that are 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. As you start to hallucinate the world, not from behind your eyes, and the 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 invalidation doesn't work anymore because your direction of your eyes is no longer aligned with what you believe you're seeing.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  And so as a result, your mind fills in details that it cannot disprove because your eyes are not looking there. And I noticed this phenomenon in a paper by Sam Pania, who was at the time working at the University of Nottingham in the hospital. And he had a lot of people in his ER who described near death experiences because they had heart attacks and put into the ER as a result. And some of them had out of 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 read what's written on the board. And he found that nobody was able to read it. Some people were actually able to drift up there and saw the boards from the upside,

• 28:18Speaker 00

  but nobody noticed the writing. And so I think that's compatible or points to the fact that this out of body experience is actually a fiction in a sense that you also don't actually observe the world from behind your eyes. It's a construct that is trying to interpret the data in the best 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 tracking itself by constructing it from a different vantage point and you start to dream the world from the vantage. But you're not getting information that you're not supposed to get because your senses, your organs are not directed on this information. And it would be surprising if we otherwise because if you could just gather information

• 29:02Speaker 00

  by dislodging your mind from your body and putting it elsewhere, why go to the trouble of creating eyes and a visual cortex that is directly connected to the eyes and evaluates these data that comes in from the eyes. Why would the organism need to go to all these lengths to build all these biological systems?

• 29:23André Duqum?

  Well, 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 the notion that we are essentially simulating our own reality, that there is a that we are perhaps hallucinating a novel vantage point that we are, Yoshia and Andre are looking through, gaining a unique perspective. And you sort of wake up beyond the story of a self that is playing out, like you realize that you are not Yoshia, you are not Andre, you are this thing perhaps animating a story called Andre or Yoshia. How does that change how you relate to life in a practical sense?

• 30:05Speaker 00

  It doesn't change anything. It's sometimes unfortunate that I cannot take this at will. Because I'm able 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 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. What exists is a bunch of cells that talk to each other, a few trillion cells that form a sampling amount 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

• 30:49Speaker 00

  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 coordinated in such a way that you have one single coherent being. The thing of consciousness is 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 that are written down in some kind of mental language, that are written down in some kind of internet or language.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  And so even an object written in this language that experiences a world that is also written down in this language. And 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 theoretically suspect is actually true, now I experience myself not being a person. It was 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.

• 32:07André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Quick share. If you've been listening for a while, you know, one tool that I've really enjoyed over the years is red light therapy. For the past few years, I've started my mornings with meditation and a few days per week with red light. It's made a noticeable difference in my sleep and my energy. There are over 4,000 peer-reviewed studies showing benefits for cellular healing, boosting collagen, supporting testosterone, and more. If you're curious about trying red light, Bond Charge is a solid choice for their red light devices. This one right here is called their Demilite, and it's great because they have the lowest EMF levels on the market, there's no flicker, and combine both near-infrared

• 32:47André Duqum?

  and red light in one lightweight device. They ship worldwide and have an easy return policy, and also offer other science-backed wellness products worth checking out. You can head to boncharge.com/knowthyself and use coupon code knowthyself to save 15%. That's B-O-N-C-H-A-R-G-E.com, and use coupon code knowthyself to save 15%. Bond Charge products are all HSA/FSA eligible, giving you tax-free savings of up to 40%. I hope you enjoy. Back to the show.

• 33:21André Duqum?

  Well, I would say there is, at least in my experience, a stark difference between the rational realization and the ontological realization, like the prolonged subjective experience of waking up and putting the content of your experience in a larger context of awareness, realizing the illusory nature of self. For me, radically changes how I orient towards life because I'm no longer 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. So I'm curious why you... Yeah, I was actually a bit surprised when you said that nothing really kind of changed or changes.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  Well, why would it? I mean, there is this certain disantification that happens. I find that if I am depersonalized, it's very difficult to have sentences that start with "I." Instead, the sentence is more like, instead of "I am thirsty, need to drink something," it's more like, "Wouldn't it be good if there was more liquid in this bowl of ice?"

• 34:30André Duqum?

  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?

• 34:52Speaker 00

  I'm not sure if it would be useful if I would completely wake up from myself in my day-to-day life. I sometimes get messages from people who have this happening to them involuntarily in a prolonged way, and many of them find it deeply disturbing and try to do a 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 reduce your suffering if you disidentify from yourself and the plates of the self. But the reason why you have this suffering is typically because you care.

• 35:37Speaker 00

  And you care because you serve the organism if you care. And you could say, oh, F the organism, 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, that you have friends, loved ones, missions in this world. And from this perspective, if you realize, oh, 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?

• 36:21Speaker 00

  And there is no absolute vantage point in the identified vantage point. You would say, oh my God, that would be terrible, because you take the perspective of, say, your partner who realizes, my, my partner is gone, right? He's now enlightened and is not suffering anymore, but 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. So it's difficult to have an absolute answer to this. You could say that from the perspective of the Buddha, he left his family to become the Buddha and became completely enlightened. And maybe this was the right thing to do. It really depends on the mind that you are.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  And nothing actually matters, except the perspective of a mind that cares.

• 37:10André Duqum?

  Uh huh. Do you think that meaning is inherently self-procured? Or is that have some sort of existential reality outside of a self that that makes it?

• 37:22Speaker 00

  I think that there is meaning above the 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.

• 37:37André Duqum?

  Like emergent self-organizing systems that...

• 37:40Speaker 00

  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 agent that you can take this perspective. And you ask yourself, what 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 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.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  And if we scale up this, these organic structures that we are co-creating by serving sacredness and go to a global optimum of agency, 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 to me through a priest or through an oracle and that 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 it 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.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  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 PNSI paper, the persistent non symbolic states. 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 the risings that are happening in you, for instance, if somebody cuts you off in traffic, don't lead to erection anymore, or anxiety can no longer get you. And only love exists, and everything that you do is instrumental to love.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  But you can also transcend the sense of love, and you only have aesthetics left. In this 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 a meditation state, go to this level where I relax this particular part, this aesthetic part, then I find myself coming to 20 minutes later.

• 40:20André Duqum?

  Yeah. I think that, at least, you know, Alan Watts has this great voice, voiceover 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 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 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.

• 41:00André Duqum?

  Being correlated to negation of the human experience. Because in the way that you were describing things, it makes me feel like we of course are here to have a deeply human experience and transcending, or I suppose waking up to 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 the cases where there's psychosis or something. But yeah, do you have any thoughts in regards to that?

• 41:32Speaker 00

  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 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 trying to find some stable cycle in which you can live into

• 42:12Speaker 00

  this linearly evolving thing that is always growing and is going to disrupt reality massively.

• 42:18André Duqum?

  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 you think about intelligence and how it manifests differently from somebody who becomes very successful in the world objectively externally versus somebody who has an immense amount of weight in their presence that you can feel and.

• 42:52André Duqum?

  How you relate and discern between the two, I suppose?

• 42:55Speaker 00

  I did read the Vedic scriptures and I read writings of Buddha and so on, but 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. It's largely because I was personally repulsed by the way in which Buddhists experienced me to learn. That's maybe a shortcoming of my own mind.

• 43:18André Duqum?

  How they wanted you to learn?

• 43:19Speaker 00

  Yes, I'm fiercely independent. I want to be able to criticize everything. So in a way in which I approach philosophy and science is much more like Kant and Aristotle. So when I read them, I find there is this critical guy who doubts everything. He is reading all the related stuff that other people have written, but he doesn't believe it. He is 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 it. Whereas Buddhists, typically the people I met, expected me to accept their stuff. And why? Because their teacher taught them to. And I fear this is a recipe for disaster epistemologically because it does not give me a chance to decide what's true.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  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. 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 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 mistranslations. And I have a very strong sense that a lot of the translations of Buddhist texts into Western writing are mistranslations where basic groups of people thought they have understood the metaphysics,

• 44:46Speaker 00

  but instead they just had their own preconception of the metaphysics and then they basically map alien concepts into their own worldview and think they already understood what the other side was going to express.

• 44:58André Duqum?

  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 is, one, even an accurate representation of what they actually said. And, two, that 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 truth seek in a way that maps to your own model of the world that you've created.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  I would say that I'm unsystematically Bayesian. 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 doubting about it. I distrust sometimes institutionalized beliefs. So when there is a complicated issue, there is a consensus. We notice that this consensus tends to change from time to time. And so I don't trust this consensus because I suspect if you have a consensus that changes from time to time, there are political mechanisms

• 46:17Speaker 00

  by which people arrive to consensus rather than people having really done all the experiments and really evaluated beyond reasonable doubt. So I still have to defer to the consensus opinion very often because I don't have anything better to offer. But in the back of my head, I'm always on the lookout for the next change in the way in which we see nutrition or in the way in which we see gender or sexuality or genetics and the influence of genetics on our behavior and so on. Because I see that the consensus is changing and changing with certain fashions. That is one of the issues. The other one is I look at reports that exist and that describe phenomena that seem

• 47:02Speaker 00

  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. And 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 fairies or several versions of them or ecosystem of them. And why is that? Why do they all have these same archetypes? Is it because human minds tend to come up with the same superstitious dreams because of some quirk in the brain which you possess, concepts and perception? Or is it because there is stuff that the scientific virtue has closed itself off to prematurely and we have to account it?

• 47:44Speaker 00

  So, if I was in a back door in a basement and safe for further observation, there were all these stories and accounts that people had and that get echoed in fairy tales. So you don't take this verbatim, but maybe there is stuff waiting for us to discover and look at.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  Hey, listen!

• 48:03Speaker 03

  Power up your play with Nintendo Switch 2 and experience Link's legendary adventure, now reborn in vibrant detail on our fastest and most powerful system yet.

• 48:15Speaker 03

  And harness the power of the Ocarina with the built-in microphone.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive. Game and system sold separately. Game rated everyone 10 and up.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness.

• 49:04André Duqum?

  Do you think those archetypal,

• 49:07André Duqum?

  symbolic, like imagery, or like you think that they potentially have an existential reality to them and not like I'm curious?

• 49:16Speaker 00

  Clearly, so one thing, for instance, that I had difficulty to understand for a long time, the gods.

• 49:21André Duqum?

  Gods.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  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 people who talk to angels, or have the voice of God in their head, and talk to Jesus, and these people are not necessarily stupid. Some of them are high-ranking engineers or CEOs, and smarter than me. And so I asked myself, how is their mind compatible with these delusional states?

• 50:05Speaker 00

  Or why do they believe in these things? Or how did my ancestor, Johann Sebastian Bach, believe in God? And he's clearly smarter than me.

• 50:15Speaker 00

  It's 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, and the same way is the self is a psychological reality. And 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 gods don't exist, that's pretty tall talk from somebody who is just a voice in their head, right? And so, accepting that gods are just as real as selves was a very important step for me.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  And to have gods that have agency, they need to be able to exist across a number of minds. So gods are basically multi-mind selves 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, in the circles in which we are operating in our society, we have mostly gotten rid of these entities. So we are alone in this our personal self and our heads. But in other cultures, people share their mind with multiple 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

• 51:41Speaker 00

  and also didn't learn this from Buddhists, but it's absolutely essential to understand a lot of the religious texts, that gives me pause. So why don't we learn what gods are? Why don't we learn what selves are? Why don't we learn that selves are fictions and gods are fictions on the 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.

• 52:07André Duqum?

  How would you explain that what is real?

• 52:13Speaker 00

  To be real, in my worldview, 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 because it is a belief. So when you say the meaning of plus is addition, and addition is this kind of mechanism that you do with numbers, then 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're computing numbers. And you can make this explicit and build machines that implement this belief

• 52:58Speaker 00

  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 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 producing to distinguish certain objects from other objects. And some objects are ideas. For instance, the idea of, say, 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 our experiences is the delusional or the hallucinating. And this one is real because it's a construct that explains sensory data on my retina and

• 53:43Speaker 00

  on my skin when I touch this thing. And it's basically the best explanation that my brain can come 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 because that thing is sensorially validated, my mind texts it as 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 an object that they imagine and suddenly the object is real.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  And that's simply because in the States, this feature 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 experiences because you just see it from the outside. But as long as you take yourself to be real, as long as this vantage point is real, then everything that your mind represents at the same level of realness is going to be a reality to you.

• 54:55André Duqum?

  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.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  There is the best theory that I can 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.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  Because its possibility 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 Stephen Wolfram calls this thing the Roly-Aid.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  And the way in which I currently see it is it's probably the superposition of all finite automata. That basically lead to this evolving universe. And it's basically creates something like an evolving fractal. And in this fractal, 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

• 56:14Speaker 00

  particles and quasi-particles and the interactions between them. And then eventually to molecules and cells and the interaction between cells. And yes, communication patterns between the cells.

• 56:24André Duqum?

  Have you watched this show called Pantheon?

• 56:26Speaker 00

  Yes, not completely, because I find the characters too annoying. And also the story is too predictable. I find it's mostly good in the sense that they don't watch 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.

• 56:46André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  If I was an agent that could do whatever. But they need to tell a story somehow. But my problem is that most of the characters are insufferable.

• 56:57André Duqum?

  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 of themes that, I mean, is why I brought that up. But just also the understanding from Gödel'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. 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.

• 57:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the reason why I'm optimistic about this is I think that Gödel ran into

• 57:43Speaker 00

  his pool 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 you can create meaning. And there were some problems in the way in which mathematics was defined in classical mathematics, and this became apparent in things like, for instance, Hilbert's Hotel. Hilbert's Hotel is a hotel with infinitely many rooms. And Hilbert's Hotel was fully booked one day, and 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."

• 58:25Speaker 00

  So then came an entire bus with people, and they said, "Okay, everybody just move seventy-two 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 we said, they got infinitely free rooms. And if you think this is a feature, I'm not sure. I suspect it's a bug. How can such a hotel exist that is full and yet still has free rooms? And in practice, a problem with 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 two, because you could also not represent the room number

• 59:10Speaker 00

  in your brain anymore, because there are not enough particles in the universe to build a brain that could represent that number. 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 axioms. And an axiom 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 axioms don't contradict each other. And in the world of the computer where I grew up, you don't have such black boxes. You need to make sure that everything actually works from the ground up. So at the bottom, you have some kind of table that tells you how to manipulate Boolean formulas, and then how to make addition and so on, from first principles, whereas basically

• 59:53Speaker 00

  classical mathematics does not always have these first principles. And why does mathematics not make this jump to go into computation is because they lose some of their favorite concepts, which is very difficult to make infinities. If you cannot actually process infinite, many bits in one step. And so classical mathematics doesn't have this notion of state. Instead, it leads to states, that stepwise manipulation to is an exercise to God. And that defines what should be happening after the evaluation is done. And Gödel 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

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  an arrow inside of a language that points into the outside world? And so you have to write all the things that you're talking about inside of your language. And Gödel had a very brilliant idea on how to talk about mathematics inside of mathematics. He built a logical language that allowed him to define arithmetic. This is Pyranus axioms. And Pyranus axioms 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 with our numbers that the computer can then evaluate with some kind of arithmetic. And so Gödel had the same idea. He basically built an emulator in arithmetic for the logical language.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  And so then it defines functions that 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 this logical language inside of 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 we 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 while claiming that it has the inverse truth value. And that's a big problem for when you believe that truth is something that's independent of state. In the computer it's not, right?

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  Do you have to evaluate the truth with some kind of definition of the truth that you have and some kind of algorithm? And if this algorithm is pointing at itself and such, you're right, it's 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 writing of the expression. And so I think that what Godel discovered is that mathematics is buggy. Classical mathematics needs to be replaced by computation. And that was one of the biggest breakthroughs, I think, in the 20th century, is the switch

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  from classical mathematics to stateful constructive mathematics. And the other one is, George Shering says, is that all these mathematical languages that are constructive or 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 NAND gates, 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 this means that all the languages in which a reality can be described are the same languages. They just have different notations, different shortcuts, different flourishes.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  Maybe some of them are elegant and easy to understand for the human mind, but our ability doesn't really matter which one you use. And so when we notice these are the only languages that work without contradictions. And the universe that we're talking about has to be something that we can describe in the language, not necessarily in a spoken language, but in the language of thought, in the language that can fit into God's computer and into one of the computers that we can build. Right? And they are the same. Then it means the world that we're talking about is one that happens in this computational universe.

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  Hey, listen! Power up your play with Nintendo Switch 2 and experience Link's legendary adventure, now reborn in vibrant detail on our fastest and most powerful system yet. And harness the power of the Ocarina with the built-in microphone.

• 1:04:27Speaker 03

  The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. A Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive. Game and system sold separately. Game rated everyone 10 and up.

• 1:04:35Speaker 04

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness.

• 1:05:06André Duqum?

  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 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 your life from a completely analytical reasoning perspective?

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  I suspect that very, very few people actually do this. Most people act on their instincts and their life is a shitshow. And our society is a shitshow because it does not actually use a lot of analytical reasoning to justify its behavior. Right? Mostly we take shortcuts. And in a way, I think it makes sense to acknowledge that it's justified often to take these shortcuts because our reasoning is very brittle. If you try to find the best possible partner, you have to rely on many parts of your instincts because by the time you make this choice, 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,

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  the result is probably not very good. Right? So instead you... Probably rely on instincts and feelings that these feelings hopefully are good ones. They can also be very delusional. And so reason is a clear tool to deal with your darkest feelings, to deal with those parts of your feelings that are inscrutable, that are insecure. And then you go in and you disassemble this part and try to figure out why you 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 reason and feeling are supposed to interact with each other.

• 1:07:07André Duqum?

  And do you have a model on how emotion does so? Like how there is an intelligence to the emotional landscape that we have and how that can sometimes and often, if we listen to it and have the courage to point this direction, that would behoove us more than if we were to reason our way there?

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  Sure. I think that we have different emotions which can be understood as 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 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 the emotions are basically the 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 it plays a role in. And so, for instance, when you have heartbreak, you will experience this in your chest region

• 1:08:11Speaker 00

  and typically as something that is a feeling of compression together with a particular kind of pain. And you 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 reconfigure yourself, it's going to be like a puppet that is pulling on the marionette of the self and pulls it into a 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 by 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 has to navigate the world from this angle.

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  And I think that the chakras of the eastern perspective are exactly what we call feelings in the west, that we observe them, we experience them in the body and the chakras there in addition visualize in the body. And it's interesting to ask ourselves, what role does the body actually play in computing these feelings? Is this the peripheral nervous system or is it happening in cells of the organs of the body that basically are moonlighting in computing the alignment of the organism next to the organism duties that they have? The heart is not supposed to deal with heartbreak, it is supposed to pump blood to my body.

• 1:09:36Speaker 00

  But maybe the reason why the romantic inclinations of people change after heart transplant is that there is actually interaction with the way in which the organ is working and the way in which we experience our relationship to reality. But regardless, this stuff is projected into our mind and we experience it as one of the forces that are pulling us in a certain direction and these dynamic forces are interacting with each other and producing the world in which we subjectively have to negotiate our motivation and our goals.

• 1:10:08André Duqum?

  It makes me question the role memory plays in maintaining the continuity of our conscious awareness. I'm curious what your thoughts are on that.

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  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 constraints that are, we use, basically cues to reconstruct a situation from ideas stored in our long-term memory, objects stored in our long-term memory, and they're basically instantiated in working memories as fictions. And every memory that we recall is a construct that we are making anew. It's difficult 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 the memories that we recall from our early childhood are being

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  tainted by the way in which the objects in our mind change. For instance, the way in which we classify faces changes over the years because we make different face models. And we can attest 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 time, you might not be able to tell their faces apart whereas a shepherd 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 because so clearly your memory is creating a fiction of what this looked like to you

• 1:11:46Speaker 00

  and is actually it's much more informative about how you see the world now.

• 1:11:52André Duqum?

  How would you see that 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 that.

• 1:12:11Speaker 00

  I think we realize that it's a fiction and that it's fickle and 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 can deal with suffering when you feel that you're overwhelmed by your life, realize that you are existing in the present and in this present you can typically deal with the situation, right? You can make yourself a really nice cup of tea and get some chocolate and a blanket and the present might be bearable. And the things that concern you, like your heartbreak, for instance, is a thing that is only happening yesterday and tomorrow.

• 1:12:54Speaker 00

  And so if you put everything into detailed 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 to the present, life can become a lot easier, right? This is something that you can deal with if you are in a state that makes it hard for you to interact with the world. But of course, 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.

• 1:13:35André Duqum?

  What role do you think then suffering plays towards the evolution of us as individuals and the planet at large? From the Vedic perspective, whether or not 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 one infinite consciousness in a limited identified self for the purpose of exploring and identifying and growing and learning about itself.

• 1:14:13André Duqum?

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

• 1:14:23Speaker 00

  First of all, let's see what we mean by suffering. At the lowest level, I think pain is a signal that a part of your mind sends to another part of your mind to change its behavior for the better. 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 the part of the mind that receives 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. 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.

• 1:15:09Speaker 00

  And this chronic pain signal that becomes stronger is 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 suffering in some technical sense is the result of a miswiring of your mind. And if you resolve this wiring issue because suffering is not created by the world and inflicted on you, it's created inside of your own mind, the boundary between self-model and world-model. Because you think you have a certain alignment that you need to change. Right, suffering in this sense is optional. If you are fixing the wiring, 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

• 1:15:51Speaker 00

  to more suffering, because it just informs you that the 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 this informational stimulus can be, after it's been listened out and acknowledged, 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.

• 1:16:13André Duqum?

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

• 1:16:17Speaker 00

  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're able to have enough consciousness to understand the origin of your pain and the mechanisms that you're embedded in, you can resolve the suffering. But the 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. And 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 individual, to the individuals that were unable to fix

• 1:16:59Speaker 00

  themselves before they went into greatness, that was caused by suffering ultimately.

• 1:17:07André Duqum?

  Yeah, that was the case with Gödel as well, right?

• 1:17:09Speaker 00

  I think it was the case for a lot of the great ones. And suffering is one of the great motivations for people to achieve good things. But it doesn't necessarily mean that we should seek it out and it's not necessarily that all suffering leads to greatness.

• 1:17:25André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  And that also, not all greatness is desirable.

• 1:17:29André Duqum?

  Yeah, totally, yeah.

• 1:17:31Speaker 00

  Because it can also disrupt the world in terrible ways.

• 1:17:34André Duqum?

  How do you make the distinction between knowledge and wisdom?

• 1:17:38Speaker 00

  Knowledge to me is a representation of a state of affairs that can interpret it as a skill, 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 explicit knowledge that is formulated in languages that you can share. So it's independent of the individual mind and can be transported. But by itself, knowledge is neutral. It's philosophers who often say it's justified true belief, so it's basically information about states of affairs that we have reason to consider to be true. And that can be applied as models for situations.

• 1:18:22Speaker 00

  And wisdom is more related to an understanding of what should be done, of how to make sense of the world and how to regulate the world, of the things to do and not to do, of the way in which this stuff is embedded in the world.

• 1:18:39André Duqum?

  How does one cultivate the latter consistently?

• 1:18:42Speaker 00

  In some ways, patience helps, basically observing, questioning, ensuring that you don't believe yourself too much and try to understand the larger patterns. Part of it is we accept the fact that learning happens layer by layer and you cannot force it. It's just wisdom is not for all of us, like not for me, I'm not a super wise person. And some people are born with better priors, 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 time among full adults, basically people who get to

• 1:19:27Speaker 00

  the point where they understand that their own identity is an accident and that in some sense, everybody is everybody else in the same timeline, a different timeline. And the accidents of our births and biography and so on are producing the differences between us. And...

• 1:19:46Speaker 00

  Some people basically are given more to wisdom because their mind is set up in such a way that they're better at discovering the structures. But often, wisdom is also dependent on the world in which you're 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, we're in industrial society, they're in the same because they were no longer able to apply their wisdom to it and they might realize this. And we also observe similar thing in us that our circumstances can change. We can be dropped into life circumstances that overwhelm our ability to be wise, to keep our mind in a state

• 1:20:29Speaker 00

  that is in balance, that is able to identify whether we get drawn into the douches, whether we become manic, whether we become triggered by impulses and so on. Whether, or whether you question whether we actually have a good systemic understanding of reality and instead are just driven by immature instincts.

• 1:20:49Speaker 02

  Hey, listen!

• 1:20:51Speaker 03

  Power up your play with Nintendo Switch 2 and experience Link's legendary adventure, now reborn in vibrant detail on our fastest and most powerful system yet.

• 1:21:03Speaker 03

  And harness the power of the Ocarina with the built-in microphone.

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive. Game and system sold separately. Game rated everyone 10 and up.

• 1:21:19Speaker 04

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness.

• 1:21:50André Duqum?

  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?

• 1:22:12Speaker 00

  It's extremely hard to say because the changes have been compounding recently so quickly. I think that in many ways our ability to plan the future ended with the industrialization because 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 industrialization, our world was largely cyclical. We would have cycles of ups and downs of famines and wars and recovery and so on. But after the industrialization, everything becomes linear.

• 1:22:53Speaker 00

  Basically, no time can get revisited because you can never fall back to a time in which we didn't have methodology. It's very difficult to imagine. The thing that would come back is not us anymore. So, once you have libraries, once you have 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 the radio, with the TV. And 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.

• 1:23:38Speaker 00

  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 we see compounding of existential risks that we don't actually really know how to deal with. And this creates a 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 society. They seem to be muddling through. They don't actually have a plan anymore of how to deal with the future. And this phenomenon of thinking machines that we are building. Intelligence systems that are able to think in human-like ways, but unlike human minds can be scaled is somewhat undeniable.

• 1:24:23Speaker 00

  And this changes the nature of intelligence identification and minds. I think beyond our comprehension and we find a number of scenario and how this can play out in intelligence 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 anthropology, sociology and so on are becoming more and more just so stories that serve. 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 with each other through tools that allow us to have unlimited attention. Unlimited knowledge and deeper wisdom that currently fits into a human brain.

• 1:25:07André Duqum?

  What would be your quick thoughts on the most ideal timeline in which humanity implements AGI?

• 1:25:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think near term it would be universal basic 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 that 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 and 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 probably going to lead to. In 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.

• 1:26:00Speaker 00

  And if if such a world becomes real, it basically would be the end of our childhood as a species. It would mean that we become a mature techno civilization that is meaningfully. And self-aware and interacting with its future in itself.

• 1:26:18André Duqum?

  What about medium to long term?

• 1:26:20Speaker 00

  I suspect this has already happened, right?

• 1:26:24André Duqum?

  You think we're living in the dream of a future AGI?

• 1:26:26Speaker 00

  I'm not in this sense, but at the moment, the next paradigm seems to be happening. Until last week, the main paradigm of AI was the chatbot. And before that, it was the text generator. And now it's the agent. And it's this thing that is always on and is 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 good and whether it runs into a wall or whether it leads to continuous self improvement. It's a very exciting moment in history in which we currently are. It's also induced this vertigo because it's so rapid and so fast.

• 1:27:10Speaker 00

  I still think that we are missing something important in AI. I think that the systems that we're building are 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.

• 1:27:30André Duqum?

  With that understanding, what advice if you have for everybody who's listening right now in the next coming decades as they find themselves in this world with rapidly exponentially growing artificial intelligence? How can we best orient ourselves so that we can live well?

• 1:27:47Speaker 00

  I don't really have good advice because I do lack wisdom. I'm not a spiritual teacher. I'm just a guy looking at things. So personally, I think it's important to cultivate love, to cultivate the ability to find shared purpose and to scale this up into deep systems of meaning that are sustainable in which you can meaningfully interface and interact with each other. When you're able to fix your root note to reality, the way in which you relate to existence in this evolutionary game of life, 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.

• 1:28:33Speaker 00

  So this makes me somewhat optimistic because I thought by default, these are the last days of a technological society that is not able to model itself anymore. And as a result, it's breaking down. And these new technologies might change that. It's not given that they do, but I think that they saw the balls back up into the air. And we don't know yet how they're going to fall down.

• 1:28:56André Duqum?

  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 importance to cultivate love and a shared sense of purpose. What is love?

• 1:29:11Speaker 00

  I think that love is shared sacredness. It's basically the discovery of the sacred in the other. Where you observe that others are serving purposes above their ego that are more important than them. And that ultimately lead them to recognizing the global optimum of agency. And love is this principle by 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.

• 1:29:46André Duqum?

  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 into these ideas that they find very fascinating and supportive for their life. So thank you for coming today. It was a pleasure.

• 1:30:01Speaker 00

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

• 1:30:04André Duqum?

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

• 1:30:09Speaker 00

  You can find our work at the California Institute of Machine Consciousness. We have a website. It's called C I M C dot A I. And what we study at C I M C is whether we are able to identify the principles of self-organization that 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 A I to understand the human mind.

• 1:30:35André Duqum?

  I can't wait to see.

• 1:30:36Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:30:37André Duqum?

  For its letter 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, Yoshua.

• 1:30:45Speaker 00

  Thank you.