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

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

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 usehttps://www.boncharge.com/knowthyself[Code: KNOWTHYSELF]André's Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list___________00:00 Intro: Josha Bach04:24 Agnosticism, Evidence, and Logical Alternatives11:20 Reality as a Mental Simulation13:00 What Physicalism Actually Claims16:55 Telepathy, Rituals, and Distributed Minds19:45 Consciousness Does Not Make Decisions22:55 Free Will as a Post-Hoc Story24:00 Consciousness as a Trance State26:00 Meditation and the Illusion of Self29:10 Out-of-Body Experiences Explained31:07 Ad: BON CHARGE36:30 Why the Brain Fills in Missing Reality39:50 Dreams, Selves, and Narrative Identity43:20 Intelligence, Models, and World-Building47:10 Why Reality Feels Stable51:00 Meaning, Agency, and Mental Compression55:10 Why Consciousness Feels Central (But Isn’t)59:30 The Psychological World vs Physical Reality1:04:10 Intelligence Without Awareness1:08:45 The Cost of Believing the Self Is Real1:13:30 Waking Up From the Narrative1:18:40 What a Cognitive Science View Really Implies1:23:30 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/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

The world that you and me experience is a dream. It's a dream generated in our respective brains. It's really a fiction that you are producing to make sense of reality. Consciousness is actually a dream state. If this is a dream reality, what would be the steps to be waking up from that dream reality? I suspect that very, very few people actually do this. Most people act on their instincts and their life is a shit show. 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. common. If we take out-of-body experiences, for example, don't take this verbatim. The reason why you have the 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. Yo-shaw, thank you for being here.

Can you explain in layman terms the relationship between mind and matter from your perspective? Well, in absolute layman term, you could say that mind is a causal pattern. It's 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, post-eatism. a thing 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 programming, they use a programming language and they use computers made out of silicon semiconductors 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 this software.

And the software that we find in nature is not written by humans, but instead it has sparked itself into existence together with the origin of life, because life is actually about this possessive software. And since then, it's growing and evolving. And so we could say that in some sense, Darwin's perspective, the origin of species and evolution as the competition between species has been supplanted later by the perspective of genetics, by Dawkins, who basically puts the gene in the center

and says that evolution is actually about these weird molecules that use phenotypes to reproduce themselves. and it's not so much about the phenotypes. And I would say from this last perspective, it's actually about software agents that are reproducing themselves by beating matter into shape, into cells, into organisms made out of many cells,

into groups of individuals made of many organisms, or into civilizations made out of many groups. So we have many, many layers of organization, and all these layers can in some sense be described as self-organizing software agents. And so I would say, Spirit, this old word, means self-organizing software agent. I call this position a little bit tongue-in-cheek cyber animism,

because it's basically getting us full circle to the beliefs of our ancestors and all other cultures outside of Western science that spirits actually do exist, that they're intrinsically agentic, that they're able to control the future, and there's nothing magical about them. They don't require us to rethink physics. There are basically patterns within physics inscribing themselves onto particles, onto molecules, and their dynamics.

So can you then give your distinction of how you think about the shortcomings of the physicalist, idealist, and pansearchist 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? 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. And so ultimately the question is when you have a certain idea or certain belief,

that you think is the case, can you walk me through the steps? of how you get there, how you establish that this is true. In a sense, I think that, for instance, a really terrifying thing about astrology is not such only that astrologers are positioning 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 as millions of people, which back then was basically impossible. And they would have to use mathematical

tools that they had no chance to learn because these statistical tools were not developed yet. So they could not have done the necessary mathematics to actually derive these things. So there was no way that the astrologer could walk you through the steps that would actually justify the idea that they have. Now if we

go back to pen-psychism or idealism, the beliefs, for instance, that matter itself is conscious. How on earth would you establish this? 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 it's in the same way as we dream a physical reality around us, and it's not the physical reality that we dream,

but some abstraction in which we see people and expressions and colors and sounds and have emotions about all those things, right? This is a game engine that 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 tools, 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 all this stuff just plays out as some kind of automatic game. And the second part of physicalism is that we directly supervene on this level, which means

the dynamics, the patterns that emerge in this physical reality contain us and make us possible. Instead of there being another layer in it, like imagine there would be apparent universe that contains some server farm in VR-1 is a simulation in that server farm, right? and we would not be in base reality, but in some kind of simulated reality. And that could still be physicalism. It could still be that our 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 supervene on this layer. And this hypothesis makes certain predictions, for instance, that events largely play out without our intentions on the lowest level. For instance, whether you win the lottery and so on has very little to do with your

intentions. And 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 a mind is messing with matter in a way that is actually compatible with physicalism. some bodies actually interfacing, interfering with reality. There are some weird phenomena, for instance,

when people are performing rituals and so on, 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. And you have some person that you are,

resonating with very much, you can often experience their emotion. 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. 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 looks like everything is mechanical and physical, like the dice are falling because of mechanical laws. Instead, you exist in some kind of meta-dream and in my dream of a larger agent in which you are just an idea. And I think what makes the whole affair so confusing is that the world that you and me experience clearly is a dream. It's a dream generated in our respective brains,

but it's a dream world. The world that you experience is one in which miracles are possible because you can be hypnotized into experiencing them. Your mind can have glitches. your mind can construct arbitrary experiences for you, and you can witness those experiences. And our culture is 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. 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 the psychological one. It's a dream world. Consciousness is actually a dream state.

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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. No, it's mostly that I was trying to take stock of the causal mechanisms that I observe in my environment.

And I found that the world that I inhabit is largely explainable through mechanical interactions. Some of these are very 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 as 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 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 a water pipe between two houses to dig it up. and so he decided to try us to do dowsing. My father was not esoteric and did not necessarily believe in these things, but he was an artist, and he also did not necessarily believe in the scientific institutions which tell us that dowsing doesn't work. So he just tried, and he tried by getting his two children independent of each other, walk down the street with an improvised dousing rod from two pieces of welding wire. And we were told, when you walk down the street and you walk over this water pipe,

I don't know where it is, these two rods will start touching each other. And it was clear to me, I have to make some kind of subconscious movement when this is happening. And when I was walking down the street, both with my sister and me, these dots 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 and I walk over it.

And there is no prima facie reason to think that it's not the case. We actually know that cells are responsible to electromagnetic fields. It plays 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 EEM 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.

How does my body, unsubconscious, understand that it's supposed to move the rods when this is happening. So that was a bit mysterious. It's nothing that forces me to break reality and so on.

I found that most of the paranormal phenomena in which I tried to look because I was interested in all the border case like exasensory perception, precognition and so on, all the stuff that I found

and looked into seem 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, that it's largely mechanical, and there is a little bit of telepathy,

a little bit of cross-noughts across minds. And that probably can be explained in normal physical ways, maybe with our bodies as antennas, maybe also working across plants and whatnot, where 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 world view 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, say Blavatsky, Gordiev 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 in which magic is able to get full right axis on the structure of and fabric of reality itself. And this is very radical because we need now to explain why the world largely is not bending to my will and my imagination.

But can I not just dream a different reality? I would have to explain this to maybe the activities of many, many minds of believing in boring physicalism and stabilizing reality in this way. But I suspect that the theory is not very convincing. As it pertains to that, I'm curious when people, people have a trans-personal or mystical experience, how would one effectively distinguish and discern what is genuine contact to a real structure beyond the self versus an internally generated hallucination?

Yeah, the thing is, as soon as we accept the possibility of hallucination, of telepathy, 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. that it becomes a slightly distributed entity. Alan Turing, in his 1950 paper in which he describes the Turing test, asked the question whether telephacy would make AI impossible. 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 biographs of Turing and the people who read this paper ignore this section. why Turing was interested in telepathy and even considered the possibility. Some argued that maybe he read this study from the 1930s that was not properly evidenced and peer reviewed. But I don't think that Turing believed in peer review very much. These were the 1950s.

Peer Review was releasing it was much more popular 60s, 70s. And to 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 in hoping that the peers are getting it right on average. It's a different way to construct the world. So I suspect that you consider telepacy to be a distinct possibility,

even though he might not even have been sure about it. But if telepathy was possible, if you basically can have an antenna that is attuning you to other minds that you're resonating with, then there will be distributed minds in the world. And maybe there will be minds at the devil of the entire biosphere. So maybe it turns out that love, Locke'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 roll it out, right?

And 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 these biomines. 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. It makes me think about, especially when you were giving the example with the sticks above the water pipes, how through the various studies our body, give or take up to 20 something seconds,

making decisions before our conscious awareness. And I'm curious your thoughts on the process of how consciousness plays in 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 choice and what that says about the nature of free will and choice and consciousness in general. 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 timescales 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 subjectively, it was more like an itch, but it still felt like scratching this itch, walking up and down, was in getting up, was a conscious decision. It was just something that I could not decide against, right? And it was something very impractical because it could have happened when I was sitting in class and 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. This was quite embarrassing. And I realized basically these are the boundaries of my free will.

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 a 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? a nervous system, or is it something where your nervous system cannot detect a glitch?

And if there is no glitch, it assumes that some part had the proper authority to trigger this action, and therefore you actually wanted this. And you, as a construct over 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 notice this when we have compulsive behavior like this versus Lexington.

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 are 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 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. The decision itself takes a 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 where 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 when you know it, it's 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.

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. 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 dream-like 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, what would be the steps to be waking up from that dream reality? Well, I suspect if we could fully wake up from it, we would not experience anything. Because consciousness itself is a trans state. The experience of the self being real is an entranement with a representation. presentation. And we can test this idea by transcending the self, for instance, during meditation.

We can get to states where we notice that we see the cell from the outside. And when I am in a state like this, I suddenly notice I'm actually not Yoshabakh. Yoshabach is just a story that exists inside of my mind, and I run on Yoshabach'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, but I'm actually not him. He's just a construct that is being told or created to tell a story for the purpose of learning and making sense of the embedding of this organism in the world.

And a large part of that story, 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 medieval, or in dreams experience that what the world looks like from the perspective of a cell or from the perspective of a tribal god or from the perspective of a family or a nation state.

And when we take these perspectives, we observe that the self, again, is a construct that exists as a messenger in a world model and this has certain affordances, certain things that it can do and so on and certain things that it cares about. And by taking this vantage point,

we experience ourselves to be that, thing. If we take out-of-body experiences, for example, out-of-body experiences are sometimes spontaneously emergent. Sometimes they are happening to people as a result of accidents in which oxygen to the brain gets diminished or also near-death experiences can sometimes trigger this. Yeah, injury to the default mode network. There's many. Yeah. 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. And so you start to hallucinate the world not from behind your eyes. And this hallucination gets kept on track by sensory data that invalidates it as soon as you hallucinate the wrong things. And when you drift out, this invalidation doesn't work anymore because your direction of your eyes is no longer aligned with what you believe you are seeing. And so as a result, your mind fills in details that it cannot disprove because your eyes are not looking there. And I noticed this phenomenon in a paper by Sam Parnia, 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 out-of-body experiences. And so he affixed boards over their beds with writing on top of the board. And he hoped that maybe one day somebody is going to drift up there and can't read what's written on the board. And he found that nobody was able to read it. Some people were actually able to drift up there and saw the boards from the upside, but nobody noticed the writing. And so I think that's compatible or points to the fact that this out-of-body experience is actually a fiction. And 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 tricking itself by constructing it from a different vantage point. And so you start to dream the world from a different angle. but you're not getting information that you're not supposed to get because your senses, your organs are not directed on this information

right and would be surprising it would be otherwise because if you could just gather information by dislodging your mind from your body and putting it elsewhere why go to the trouble of creating eyes and a visual cortex that is directly connected to the eyes

and evaluates these data that comes in from the eyes right why would the organism need to go to all these lengths to build all these biological systems. How does that practically change how you orient yourself towards the sensations of physical reality that you perceive? Like 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, Yosha 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 Yoshah, you are not Andre you are this thing perhaps animating a story called

Andre or Yosha how does that change how you relate to life in a practical sense? It doesn't change anything. It's sometimes unfortunate that I cannot take this at will

because I'm unable sometimes to drop out of myself or to drop into myself because I'm not always able to configure myself the way I want to. But 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 shambling mound of flesh that is being kept together by communication between the cells. And in the patterns of the communication of the cells, there needs to be a model.

of what it would be like if all these cells were one single agent that has a unified set of goals, unified actions. So one hand is not contradicting what the other hand is doing. All the muscles are coordinated in such a way that you have one single coherent being. I think 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 interstellular language.

And so I have 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. And now I experience myself not being a person. It wasn't in some sense very impressed that I can experience it in this way, but it doesn't change anything because at some rational level, I already knew that to be the case.

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I hope you enjoy. Back to the show. 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 has 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. Well, why would it? I mean, there is a certain disantification that happens. I find

that if I am depersonalized, it's very difficult to have sentences that start with I. Instead, the sense is more like, instead of I am thirsty, you need to drink something. It's more like, wouldn't it be good if there was more liquid in this volume of space? Well, I agree with the fact 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 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 transfer that analogy towards waking up from the self in our day-to-day life?

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 and 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 plights of the self but the reason why you have this suffering

is typically because you care. And you care because it serves 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? And there is no absolute vantage point. And 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 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. really depends on the mind that you are and nothing actually matters except the perspective of a mind that cares. Uh-huh.

Do you think that meaning is inherently self-procured or is that have some sort of existential reality outside of a self that makes it? 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. Like emergent self-organizing systems that... Yeah, emergent agency is, for instance, the causal structure of your family is an agent itself.

And your family, by you serving the family, becomes an 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 large or 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. Sacredness is purposes above the ego above the self. And so we are constructing a self that is seeing itself as a servant to more important things. And if we scale up these agentic 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 just possesses a part of the world,

but it's a thing that I'm co-constructing where I ask myself from the perspective of the best possible agent that can be part of. What is the thing that I should be doing? And so in this sense, I believe that there is meaning above the self. But of course, you can transcend 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 PNSE 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 and traffic

don't lead to a reaction anymore or anxiety can no longer get you. And only love exists and everything that you do is instrumental to love. But you can also transcend the sense of love and you only have aesthetics left. In the state you only look for structure in the world and it's not that the structure is good or bad anymore.

It's just interesting or boring. 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. Yeah. I think that at least, you know, Ellen Watts has this great voice, uh, 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 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 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

more of our true nature 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 cases where there's psychosis or something. But yeah, do you have any thoughts in regards to that? I think it's possible to transcend it, but it's risky. I suspect that people like Steve Jobs have at some point transcended part of what held them back

and turned into this immense, scalable thing. Or if you think of Jeff Bezos, who at some point seems to have had an epiphany that turns him into a universal 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 this linearly evolving thing that is always growing and is going to disrupt reality massively. How much have you studied masters and teachings from the Far East as opposed to

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 how you relate and discern between the the two, I suppose. 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 as 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. How they wanted you to learn? 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's trying to disinfect it, sanitize it, and put it together into his own worldview. And to me, this is a very natural way to do, whereas Buddhists typically the people I met expected me to accept their stuff. And why? Because their teacher told them too. And I feel this is a recipe for

disaster epistemologically because it does not give me a chance to decide what's true. 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, 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 basically groups of people thought they have understood the metaphysics, but instead they just had their own preconception of the metaphysics. And then they basically map alien concepts into their own worldview and think they already understood what the other side was going to express. I completely agree. And I have a deep allergy towards the assumptions we make based off extrapolating somebody who died a couple thousand years ago that got translated over hundreds of years throughout different languages. And we're supposed to assume that there 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. I would say that I'm unsystematically Bayesian. So basically, I start out with the 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 where 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 by which people arrive to consensus. rather than people having really done all the experiments and really evaluated beyond a 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 and our behavior and so on, because I see that the consensus is changing and changing with certain fashions, right? That is one of the issues. The other one is I look at reports that exist and that describe phenomena that seem to be somewhat

invariant across cultures. For instance, as a child, I read the fairy tales of all the cultures I could get my hands on, African fairy tales, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, French. 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 a way in which you process concepts and perception? Or is it because there is stuff that the scientific worldview has closed itself off to prematurely and we have to account this. So file this in a backdoor in the basement and say, 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. Need a vehicle that isn't afraid to make a splash? That's the Volkswagen Touse. Capable and confident, the Volkswagen Touse is fit for everyday life. Nimble in traffic, agile and tight spots,

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Clearly. So one thing, for instance, that I had difficulty to understand for a long time, the gods. Gods. Because I live in a world largely without gods. Not only is it secular in a sense that people don't believe in the authority of religious institutions to explain reality and the entities that the religious texts describe are seen as superstition or as allegorical or metaphorical instead of being real.

But from time to time, I've been running into people who talk to angels or have the voice of God and their head and talk to Jesus. And these people are not necessarily stupid, right? Some of them are high-ranking engineers or CEOs and smarter than me. And so I ask myself, how is their mind compatible with these delusional states? 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.

It doesn't see, it seemed to be a big nerd, not somebody who is picking his beliefs because of his environment, why was he so deeply religious? And at some point I realized that gods are psychological realities in the same way as the self is a psychological reality. 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 a head, right? And so accepting that gods are just as real as selves was a very important step for me. And to have gods that have agency, they need to be able to exist across a number of minds. So gods are basically multi-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 and our association, society, we have mostly gotten rid of these entities. So we are alone with 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. 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. 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. How would you explain that what is real? Well, to be real, in my worldview, is to be implemented, which means there is some causal pattern that makes that stuff actually happen,

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 are computing numbers. And you can make this explicit and build machines that implement this belief in the same way without the machine believing it, but realizing it. So in this sense, even addition can be real. The other thing is the experience of realness. And the experience of realness that you've experienced, oh my God, I'm looking at this glass and this glass is real. This is a feature that my mind is.

is producing to distinguish certain objects from other objects. 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 us experiences is they're delusional or they're hallucinating. And this one is real because it's a construct that explains sensory data on my retina

and on my skin when I touch this thing. and 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 sensually validated, my mind takes it at 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. And that's simply because in these 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 is experiencing 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 represent at the same level of realness is going to be a reality to you. Yeah, it sounds like there's perhaps levels to being real. Like something could be relatively real within our subjective, conscious awareness or imaginative experience. 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,

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 Roliath. 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 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 particles and quasi-particles into interactions between them and then eventually to molecules and cells and the interaction between cells

and via communication patterns between the cells. Have you watched the show called Pantheon? Yes, not completely, because I find the characters too annoying and also the story is too predictable. I find it's mostly good in a 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 the VR 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. Well, you haven't made it to the end of the second season where it gets quite good, I think, but that's subjective personal opinion. I'm curious because there's a couple themes that, I mean, is why, I brought that up, but just also the understanding from Girtle'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.

Yeah. So the reason why I'm optimistic about this is I think that good. riddle ran into his proof from the wrong side. Mathematics is in some sense an attempt to generalize thinking beyond what the human mind can do. It's the set of all formal languages, all the ways in which 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. Hillbert'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 in the hotel had an idea and told everybody just move one room to the right. And you got a free room. So then came an entire bus with people. And he said, okay, everybody just moved 72 rooms to the right and we can fit this bus in.

And then came infinitely many buses. And then the owner of the hotel at the idea, everybody moved in the room with twice their room number. And as a result, I got infinitely free rooms. And if you think this is a feature, I'm not sure. I suspect it's a buck. How can such a hotel exist that is full and yet it 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. too, because you could also not represent the room number in your brain anymore, because there are not enough particles in the universe to build a brain that could represent that number.

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

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 classical mathematics does not always have these first principles. And why does mathematics not make this jump to go into computation? It's because they lose some of their favorite concepts. So it's very difficult to make infinities. if you cannot actually process infinitely many bits in one step. And so classical mathematics doesn't have this notion of state.

Instead, it leaves the states, this stepwise manipulation as an exercise to God, and just defines what should be happening after the evaluation is done. And Gouldel knew that it's not possible when you want to fix the foundation of mathematics to do this from the outside, because languages can only point inside. There is no way to get your language to point into the outside. world because how would you make an arrow inside of a language that points into the outside world? And so you have to write all the things that you're talking about inside of your language. And Gouldle 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 with it, Piano's axioms. And Piano's 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, which are numbers, that the computer can then evaluate with some kind of arithmetic. And so Guder had the same idea.

He basically builds an emulator in arithmetic for his logical language. And so then it defines functions, mathematical arithmetic functions that can manipulate the numbers, that in such a way that the manipulations are actually, equivalent to the meaning of the symbols. And so he can evaluate his 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 he can make self-referential statements in there. And then he can show that certain things cannot be avoided like a statement that is pointing at itself 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? 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 in such a way that overwrites the truth value, then maybe the truth's value will never be stable. But tough luck, this is just how you made it. 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 Gould has 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, the switch from classical mathematics to a stateful, constructive mathematics.

And the other one is, the short-shuering thesis, is that all these mathematics, languages that are constructive, all the computational languages have the same power. Which means it doesn't really matter whether you're using basic or Python or Java or Boolean logic or Nantgates. They're all the same. Game of Life constructors. Many, many different ways to define computation from the ground app 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. Maybe some of them are elegant and easy to understand for the human mind, but ultimately it 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 are talking about has to be something that we can describe in a language, not necessarily in a spoken language, but in a language of thought, in a language that can fit into God's computer or 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. It's never too early to plan your summer story in Europe with WestJet, from rolling countryside to cobblestone streets. Begin your next chapter. Book your seat at westjet.com or call your travel agent. WestJet, where your story takes off. What is the... So, I mean, very eloquently throughout,

and then also and 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 at being the predominant mode of knowing or engaging with reality, I'm curious what you think the direct cost is by living our life from a completely analytical reasoning perspective. I suspect that very, very few people actually do this. Most people act on their instincts and their life is a shit show. And our society is a shit show because it does not actually use a lot of analytical reasoning to justify its behavior. Mostly we take shortcuts.

And in a way, I think it makes sense to acknowledge that it's justified often to take these short cuts because our reasoning is very brittle. If you try to find the best possible partner, you have to rely in 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, the result is probably not very good. So instead, you probably rely on instincts, on feelings, and these feelings, hopefully are good ones. They can also be very delusional.

And so reason is actually a tool to deal with your darkest feelings, to deal with those parts of your feelings that are inscrutable, that are unsure, and then you go in and you disassemble this part and try to figure out why I do 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. And do you have a model in 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 us an erection, that would behoove us more than if we were to reason our way there. 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 a 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 and typically as something that is as 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 world.

itself and pulls it into a particular shape. And now the marionette has to deal with this shape that is being pulled into and has to interact with the world while being put into this position, into this constricted pain position where it needs to resolve an issue and might feel helpless or feel grief or feel broken and so on. And it has to navigate the world from this angle. And I think that the chakras of the eastern perspective are exactly what we call feelings in the West.

We observe them, we experience them in the body, and the chakras they are in addition visualized in the body. And it's interesting to ask ourselves, what role does the body actually play in computing these feelings? Is this 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 their organismic duties that I have?

The heart is not supposed to deal with heartbreak, it is supposed to pump blood through my body. 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 at 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 subject. we have to negotiate our motivation and our goals. It makes me question the role memory plays and maintaining the continuity of our conscious awareness. I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. Memory is a way to carry information into the future, mostly for future learning. And some of our memories are fictitious, right? The contents of the memories are 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

that we instantiated in working memories as fictions. And every memory that we recall is a construct that we are making anew. And 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. And so I suspect that the memories that we recall from our early childhood are being tainted by the way in which the objects in our mind change. For instance, the way in which 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. So clearly, your memory is creating a fiction of what this looked like to you and is actually it's much more informative about how you see the world now. 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 thought. 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. And so if you put everything into daytight compartments and only live in this interval, while behaving in such a way that you will not be broke tomorrow and you will be able to face tomorrow in the best possible way.

But experimentally, 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 cell, of a construct that we can tune to make it as useful to us as we can.

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. I'm curious whether or not you agree and what role suffering then plays from the larger perspective. First of all, let's see what we've been. 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 received the signal is not able to change the situation or the world is not set up in such a way that you can change it or the thing is not actually a thing that needs to be changed, right? Or it conflicts with another more important goal that you don't want to give up on. So while the pain signal becomes stronger, you don't have a way to mitigate its origin. And this chronic pain signal that becomes stronger as a result of this mismatch between action and the signal that directs the action, that is what we call suffering. So you could say that suffering in some technical sense is the result of a miswiring of your mind.

and if we resolve this wiring issue because suffering is not created by the world and inflicted on you, it's created inside of your own mind at the boundary between self-model and world model because you think you have a certain alignment that you need to change. Suffering in a sense is optional.

If you are fixing the wiring, the suffering will disappear. The pain might not be, but it does not necessarily have to create suffering. When you get older, you may have more back pain but it does not necessarily need to more suffering because it just informs you 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 being 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. Yeah, they don't compound the pain by this narrative we place on top of it. And it's tempting to say we should not suffer at all. I think that approximately true to say that suffering is a result of a lack of consciousness. If you're able to have enough consciousness to understand the origin of your pain and the mechanisms

that you are embedded in, you can resolve the suffering. But 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 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 to the individuals that were unable to fix themselves before they went into greatness

that was caused by suffering ultimately. Yeah, that was the case with Gertil as well, right? I think it was this case for a lot of the great ones. 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.

Yeah, it's just a little. And that's also not all greatness is desirable. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Because it can also disrupt the world in terrible ways. How do you make the distinction between knowledge and wisdom? Knowledge, to me, is a representation of a state of affairs that can either be tacit, like a skill.

It's basically specific to your own organism, like the knowledge how to ride a bicycle, something that is difficult to explain. by itself because it is tied into your nervous system. And there is this 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. Philosophers, you 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.

That can be applied as models across situations. 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 the self is embedded in the world. How does one cultivate the latter consistently? In some ways, patience helps, so basically observing, questioning, ensuring, ensuring that you don't believe yourself too much. much and try to understand the larger patterns. Part of it is we accepting 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 supervised 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 the point where they understand that their own identity is an accident and that in some sense everybody is everybody else in a different timeline.

And the accidents of our birth and biography and so on are producing the differences between us. And some people basically are given more to wisdom because their mind is set up in such a way that they're better at discovering these structures. But often wisdom is also dependent on the world in which you are in. For instance, a lot of indigenous cultures had elders that basically were very, very good at understanding the relationship

that the tribe had to the evolutionary game of the forests and ecosystems around them and how to deal with this. And when they were confronted with an industrial society, they went insane because they were no longer able to apply their wisdom to it and they might realize this. And we also observe a similar 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 that is in balance,

that is able to identify whether we get drawn into delusions, whether we become manic, whether we become triggered by impulses and so on, and whether our ability to question whether we actually have a good systemic understanding of reality and instead are just driven by immature instincts. This episode is brought to you by FedEx. These days, the power move isn't having a big metallic credit card to drop on the check at a corporate launch. The real power move is leveling up your business with FedEx intelligence

and accessing one of the biggest data networks powered by one of the biggest delivery networks. Level up your business with FedEx, the new Power. move. What would you say from, and it's not a given, but let's say the humanity reaches the 25th century and peers back into the 21st century and finds observations about our current developmental moment, what do you think would be the predominant observation and how does how we view intelligence change over the next coming decades and centuries?

It's extremely hard to say because the changes have been compounding recently so quickly. I think that in many ways, our ability to plan the future ended with the industrialization because our future changed faster than our models of the future could. 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. You would have cycles of ups and downs of feminines and wars and

recovery and so on. But after the industrialization, everything becomes linear. We 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. A 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 have a bit of a headless chicken. And so we still have these technological revolutions, but we don't really have a strong belief in the future anymore because we have difficulty to picture ourselves in it. everything is changing too fast.

And we see compounding of existential risks that we don't actually really know how to deal with. And this creates certain helplessness and we just as best hope to muddle through. At least that's my sense. When I look at the theories of our elites and the

planners and governments of our 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 intelligent systems that are able to think in human-like ways, but unlike human minds can be scaled, somewhat undeniable. And this changes the nature of intelligence, identification,

and minds, I think, beyond our comprehension. And we find a number of scenario on how this can play out in 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 those 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. What would be your quick thoughts on the most ideal timeline in which humanity implements

AGI. Yeah, I think near term, it would be your 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 let my AIs talk to your AIs and sort all the things out. It also means we can no longer hide. All the information will be out in the open because it can be inferred. And so we will have a world in which people can not 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 a system in which we have to account for the way in which we go into the future and in which all our actions count for that future and matter for it. And 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. What about medium to long term?

I suspect this has already happened. You think we're living in the dream of a future AGI? No, no, 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 a thing that is always on and it's self-improving and is acting on behalf

and with a 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 and so it's a very exciting moment in history in which we currently are it's also induces vertigo because it's so rapid and so fast

I still think that we are missing something important in AI. I think that these systems that we're building are grammatically inefficient. The way which they learn is just not right. I don't think that you learn by imitation. I think you learn by making sense of reality, by projecting yourself into it and by understanding the possibilities that you can have in this world. With that understanding, what advice if you have for everybody who's listening right now 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? 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 meanings 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. So this makes me somewhat optimistic because I thought per default, these are the last days of, of a technological society that is not able to model itself anymore, and the result is 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.

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? I think that love is shared sacredness.

That's basically the discovery of the sacred and 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 a 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. Beautifully said. Well, to me, this has felt like a shared purpose that we get to have these conversations and have a wider community, you know, tune into these ideas that they find very fascinating and supportive for their life. So thank you for coming today. It was a pleasure.

Thank you for inviting me. It was big joy. Yeah. Is there any work that you have upcoming, you want to share? share with people we can leave links down towards. You can find our work at the California in silver machine consciousness. We have a website. It's called cimc.aI.i.

And what we study at cimc 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 AI to understand the human mind. I can't wait to see. Thank you. Fruits that are bears. Thank you. And for everybody tuning into this episode, let us know in which ways, as always, this episode has resonated with you. Until next time, be well. Thank you, Yosha.

Thank you.