Understanding Consciousness: Dualism, Idealism, and Materialism

The mind crafts a simulated reality, where consciousness emerges as a narrative shaped by interactions and perceptions.

### Exploring Consciousness: The Interplay of Dualism, Idealism, and Materialism
* 🧠 Dualism posits that there are **two distinct substances**: mental and physical, each governed by **different rules**, suggesting a **separation between consciousness and the material world**.
* 🌌 Idealism asserts that the mind is primary, viewing the material world as a **construct or dream of the mind**, while materialism claims that the physical world is fundamental, with consciousness emerging from **material interactions**.
* 💡 The speaker argues that our understanding of reality is shaped by a **long history of cultural indoctrination**, particularly by **religious narratives** that have created a framework for societal interactions.
* 🕹 This perspective likens our existence to a **multiplayer role-playing game**, where the material objects we perceive are **illusory**, akin to the Eastern concept of "**maya**," emphasizing that **meaning is derived from our interactions** rather than inherent in the objects themselves.
* 🔄 The conversation highlights that **consciousness is a narrative constructed by our brains**, which model interactions and experiences, leading to the idea that our **identities are software states** rather than fixed entities.
* 🌀 The speaker suggests that while we perceive a **consistent physical reality**, this consistency arises from **underlying patterns and feedback mechanisms** that govern complex systems, rather than being a direct reflection of a **singular objective reality**.
* 🔍 Ultimately, the discussion raises profound questions about the **nature of existence**, suggesting that the mind creates a **simulation** that allows us to interpret and navigate a **complex universe**, with the self being an **emergent property** of this narrative process.
* 🌈 The exploration of consciousness concludes by emphasizing the importance of **understanding our identities as fluid constructs** shaped by our experiences and interactions within this intricate web of reality.

What is dualism? What is idealism? What is materialism? What is functionalism? And what connects with you most in terms of... because you just mentioned there's a reality we don't have access to. Okay, what does that even mean? And why don't we get access to

it, only part of that reality? Why don't we... can we access it? So the particular trajectory that mostly exists in the West is the result of our indoctrination by a cult for 2,000 years. A cult which... yes, oh the castle it cost...

mostly yes, and for better or worse, right? It has created or defined many of the modes of interaction that we have. That has created this society, but it has also in some sense scarred our rationality and the intuition that exists. If you would translate the mythology of the

Catholic Church into the modern world, it's that the world in which you and I interact is something like a multiplayer role-playing adventure. Yes, and the money and the objects that we have in this world, this is all not real, or as Eastern philosophers would say, it's maya. It's

just stuff that is... it appears to be meaningful, and this embedding in this meaning, and people even... it is samsara, this... it's basically the identification, this, the needs of the mundane, secular, everyday existence. And the Catholics also introduced the notion of higher meaning, the sacred. And this existed

before, but eventually the natural shape of God is the Platonic form of the civilization that you're part of. It's basically the super organism that is formed by the individuals as an intentional agent. And basically the Catholics used a relatively crude

mythology to implement software on the minds of people and get the software synchronized to make them walk in lockstep. This basically gets them online and to make it efficient and effective. And I think God, technically, is just the self that spends

multiple brains as opposed to your and myself, which mostly exists just on one brain, right? And so in some sense, you can construct yourself functionally as a function is implemented by brains that exist across brains. And this is a God with a small G. That's one of the if you

Ivar, we kind of talking, this is one of the nice features of our brains. It seems to be that we can all download the same piece of software, oh my god, in this case and kind of share it. Yes, you give everybody a spec and the mathematical constraints that are

intrinsic to information processing make sure that given the same spec, you come up with a compatible structure. Okay, so that's there's the space of ideas that we all share and we think that's kind of the mind. And but that's separate from the idea is from from Christianity for

from religion is that there's a separate thing between the mind as a real world and this real world is the world in which God exists. God is the quarter of the multiplayer adventure, so to speak, and we are all players in this game. And that's the dualism you use. Yeah, but the

fact is because the mental realm exists in a different implementation than a physical realm, and the mental realm is real. And a lot of people have this intuition that there is this real room in which you and me talk and speak right now. Then comes a layer of physics and

abstract rules and so on, and then comes another real room where our souls are, and our tool form isn't the thing that gives us phenomenal experience. And this, of course, is a very confused notion that you would get, and it's basically, it's the result of connecting materialism and

idealism in the wrong way. So okay, I apologize, but I think it's really helpful if we just tried to define, try to define terms like what is dualism and what is idealism, what is materialism for people. Adana, so the idea of dualism in our cultural

tradition is that there are two substances, a mental substance and a physical substance, and they interact by different rules. And the physical world is basically causally closed, and it's built on a low level causal structure of the, at the bottom level, that is causally closed. That's entirely

mechanical and mechanical in the widest sense. So it's computational, there's basically a physical world in which information flows around, and physics describes the laws of how information flows around in this job. Would you compare it to like a computer where you have a hardware and

software? The computer is a generalization of information flowing around basically, but you will discover that there is the new universal principle. You can define this universal machine that is able to perform all the computations. So all these machines have the same power. This, this means that you can always define a

translation between them as long as they have unlimited memory to be able to perform each other's computations. So would you then say that materialism is this whole world is just the hardware and idealism is this whole world is just a software? Not why I think that most

Idealists don't have a notion of software yet because software also comes down to information processing, right? So what you notice is the only thing that is real to you and me is this experiential world in which things matter, in which things have taste in

which things have color, phenomenal content, and so on. And you are bringing up consciousness, okay? And this is distinct from the physical world in which things have values, in only in an abstract sense. And you only look at cold patterns moving around. So how does anything feel like something? And this connection

between the two things is very puzzling to a lot of people, of course, to many philosophers. So idealism starts out with the notion that mind is primary, materialism, things that matter is primary. And so for the idealist, the material patterns that we say play and

playing out are part of the dream that the mind is dreaming, and he exists in a mind on a higher plane of existence, if you want. And for the materialist, there is only this material thing, and that generates some models, and we are the result of these models. And in some sense,

I don't think that we should understand, if you understand it properly, materialism and idealism is a dichotomy, but there's two different aspects of the same thing. So the via thing is we don't exist in the physical world. We do exist inside of a story way that the brain

tells itself, okay? That's it. Let me uh, let my my my information processing, I take, they take that in. We don't exist in the physical world. We exist in the narrative, basically. Your brain cannot feel anything new. You cannot feel anything. There are physical things, physical systems

are unable to experience anything, but it would be very useful for the brain or for the organism to know what it would be like to be a person and to feel something. Yeah, so the brain creates a simulacrum of such a person that it uses to model the

interactions of the person's, the best model of what that brain, this organism, thinks it is in relationship to its environment. So it creates that model, it's a story, a multimedia novel that the brain is continuously writing and updating. But you also kind of said that

you said that we kind of exist in the head and that's all right. Yes, that story, yeah, what is real in any of this? So like there's a, again these terms are, you kind of said there's a quantum graph. I mean, what is, what is this whole thing running

on then? Is this story, and is it completely fundamentally impossible to get access to it? Because isn't the story supposed to be in the brain, in a, in, in something, in existing in some kind of context? So what we can identify as computer scientists, we can engineer

systems and test our theories this way that may have the necessary insufficient properties to produce the phenomena that you're observing, which is theirs itself in a virtual world that is generated in somebody's neocortex, who that is contained in the skull of this primate

here. And when I point at this, this indexicality is of course wrong, but I do create something that is likely to give rise to patterns on your retina that allow you to interpret what I'm saying, right? But I both know that the world that you and me are seeing is not the

real physical world what we are seeing is a virtual reality generated in your brain to explain the patterns on your retina how close is it to the real world that's kind of the the question is it when you have when you have like people like Donna Hoffman let's say that like

that you're really far away the the thing we're seeing you and I now that interface would have it's very far away from anything like we don't even have anything close like to the sense of what the real world is or is it a very

surface piece of architecture imagine you look at the Mandelbrot set right this famous thing that when a man would discover that whoa if you see an overall shape in there right but you know if you truly understand it you know it's two lines of code it's

basically in a series that is being tested for complex numbers and in the complex number plane for every point and for those where this year is is diverging you will paint this black and where it's converging you don't and you get the intermediate colors by taking

how far is it diverges yes right this is gives you this shape of this fractal but imagine you live inside of this fractal and you don't have access to where you are in the fractal or you have not discovered the generator function even

right so what you see is all over oh I can see right now is the spiral and this variable moves a little bit to the right is this an accurate model of reality yes it is right it is an adequate description is you know that there is actually no spiral in the Mandelbrot set

fractal it only appears to be like this to an observer that is interpreting things as a two-dimensional space and then defines certain regularities in there at a certain scale that they currently observe because if you zoom in the spiral might disappear and turn out to be something

different at a different resolution right yes so at this level you have the spiral and then you discover the spiral moves to the right and at some point it disappears so you have a singularity at this point your model is no longer valid you cannot predict what happens beyond

the singularity but you can observe again and you will see it is another spiral and at this point it disappeared so maybe we now have a second-order law and if you make 30 layers of these laws then you have a description of the world

that is similar to the one that we come up with when we describe the reality around us it's reasonably predictive it does not cut to the core of it so you explain how it's being generated yeah how it actually works but it's relatively good to explain the

University of your entangled fence but you don't think the tools are computer science the tools of physics could get could step outside see the whole drawing and get at the basic mechanism of how the pattern the spiral is generated imagine you would find yourself embedded

into a mother but fractal you try to figure out what works and you you know somehow have a Turing machine there's enough memory to think and as a result you've come to this idea it must be some kind of automaton and maybe you just

enumerate all the possible [things] until you get to the one that produces your reality so you can identify necessary and sufficient conditions. For instance, we discover that mathematics itself is the domain of all languages and then we see that most of the domains of mathematics that we have discovered

are in some sense describing the same fractals. This is what category theory is obsessed about: that you can map these different domains to each other so they are not that many fractals and some of these have interesting structure and symmetry breaks and so you can just

cover what region of this global fractal you might be embedded in from first principles. Yes, but the only way you can get there is from first principles. So basically, your understanding of the universe has to start with automata and the number theory and then spaces and so

on, yeah, I think like Stephen Wolfram still dreams that he's it, that he'll be able to arrive at the fundamental rules of the cellular automata or the generalization of which is behind our universe. Yeah, it's you've said on this topic you

said in a recent conversation that quote "some people think that a simulation can't be conscious and only a physical system can, but they got it completely backward. A physical system cannot be conscious, only a simulation can be conscious." Yeah, consciousness is a simulated property that simulated itself.

Yeah, just like you said, the mind is kind of the, call it, story narrative. There's a simulation in our minds, essentially a simulation, and usually I try to use the terminology so that the mind is basically a principle that produces the simulation. It's the software that is

implemented by your brain, and the mind is creating both the universe that we are in and the self, the idea of a person that is on the other side of attention and is embedded in this world. Why is that important, that idea of self? Why is that an important feature in the

simulation? It's basically a result of the purpose that the mind has. It's a tool for modeling. Right? We are not actually monkeys. We are side effects of the regulation needs of monkeys. And but the monkey has to regulate is the relationship of an organism to an

outside world that is a large part also consisting of other organisms. And as a result, it basically has regulation targets that it tries to get to. This regulation target starts with priors. They are basic, like unconditional reflexes that we are more or less born with.

And then we can reverse-engineer them to make them more consistent, and then we get more detailed models about how the world works and how to interact with it. And so these priors that you commit to are largely target values that our needs should approach set points. And this

deviation to the set point creates some urge, some tangent, and we find ourselves living inside of feedback loops. Right? The consciousness emerges over dimensions of disagreements with the universe, things that you care about, things are not the way they should be, but you need to regulate. And so in some sense, the

self itself is the result of all the identifications that you're having. An identification is a regulation tracker that you're committing to. It's a dimension that you care about. Do you think is important? And this is also what locks you in. If you let go of these

commitments of these identifications, you get free, there's nothing that you have to do anymore, and if you let go of all of them, you're completely free, and you can enter Nirvana because you're done. And actually, this is a good time to pause and say

thank you too. So, a friend of mine, Gustavo Ostrom, who introduced me to your work, I wanted to give him a shout-out. He's a brilliant guy, and I think the AI community is actually quite amazing, and Gustavo was a good representative of that.

You are as well. Some, I'm glad, first of all, I'm glad the internet exists. YouTube is this where I can watch your talks and then get to your book and study your writing and think about, you know, that's that's amazing. Okay, but the you've kind of described instead

of this emergent phenomena of consciousness from the simulation. So, what about the hard problem of consciousness? The can you just linger on it like, but why does it still feel like, I understand you're kind of the self as an important part of the simulation, but

why does the simulation feel like something? So, if you look at the book by, say, George R.R. Martin, with the characters, they have plausible psychology, yeah, and they stand on a hill because they want to conquer the city below. They own that. Don't they look at the color of the sky and they

are principled and feel empowered and all these things. Why do they have these emotions? It's because it's written into the story, right? And it's written into the story because it's an adequate model of the person that predicts what they're going to do next. And the same thing is

helpful it's basically a story that our brain is writing it's not written in words it's written in a perceptual content basically multimedia content and it's a model of what the person would feel if it existed so it's a virtual person and you and me happen to be this

virtual person so if this virtual person gets access to the language center and talks about the sky being blue and this is us but hold on a second do I exist in your simulation you do you do exist I mean in a similar way as me so they're

internal states that I that are less accessible for me in that you have and so on and you're my model might not be completely adequate there are also things that I might perceive about you that you don't perceive but in some sense both you and me are some puppets to puppets

that enact this play in my mind and I identify with one of them because I can't control one of the puppets directly and with the other one I can create things in between so for instance we can go or in an interaction that even leads to a coupling to a feedback loop so we

can sync things together in a certain way or feel things together but this coupling is itself not a physical phenomenon entirely a software phenomenon it's a result of two different implementations interacting with each other so this is thing so are you suggesting I did like the way you

think about it is the entirety of existence a simulation and we're kind of each mind is a little sub simulation that like why don't you why doesn't your mind have access to my mind's full state like for the same reason that my mind doesn't have access to its own full state

So what I mean is there's no trick, and also basically when I know something about myself, it's because I made a model. Yes, but that of your brain is tasked with modeling what other parts of your brain are doing. Yes, but there seems to be an incredible consistency about

this world in the physical sense that there's repeatable experiments and so on. Yeah, how does that fit into our silly, the center of an ape simulation of the world? So why is it some repeat, why is everything so repeatable, and not everything? There's a lot of fundamental

physics experiments that are repeatable for a long time all over the place and so on, laws of physics. How does that fit in? It seems that the parts of the world that are not deterministic are not long-lived. So if you build a system, any kind of automaton, so if you build

simulations of something, you'll notice that the phenomena that endure are those that give rise to stable dynamics. So basically, if you see anything that is complex in the world, it's the result of usually of some control of some feedback that keeps it stable around certain

attractors, and the things that are not stable, that don't give rise to certain harmonic patterns and so on, they tend to get weeded out over time. So if we are in a region of the universe that sustains complexity, which is required to

implement minds like ours, this is going to be a region of the universe that is very tightly controlled and controllable. So it's going to have lots of interesting symmetries and also symmetry breaks that allow the creation of structure, but they exist where so the

This is such an interesting idea that our simulation is constructing the narrative, but my question is just to try to understand how that fits with this, with the entirety of the universe. You're saying that there's a region of this universe that allows enough complexity

to create creatures like us, but what's the connection between the brain, the mind, and the broader universe? Which comes first? Which is more fundamental? Is the mind the starting point and the universe is emergent? Is the universe the starting point and minds are emergent? I

think quite clearly the latter, it's at least a much easier explanation because it allows us to make causal models, and I don't see any way to construct an inverse. So what happens when you die to your mind simulation? My implementation ceases. So basically the

thing that implements myself will no longer be present. It means if I am not implemented on the minds of other people, the thing that I identify as, this, the, the good thing is I don't actually have an identity beyond the identity that I construct. If I was the Dalai Lama, he

identifies as a form of government. So basically the Dalai Lama gets reborn not because he's confused but because he is not identifying as a human being. He runs on a human being. He's basically a governmental software, right, that is instantiated in every new generation in

you. So his advisors, they'll pick someone who does this in the next generation. So if you identify with this, you are no longer human, and you don't die in this sense. Li, what dies is only the body of the human that you run on. Yeah, he to

To kill the Dalai Lama, you would have to kill his tradition. And if we look at ourselves, we realize that we're to a small part like this, most of us. So for instance, if you have children, you realize something lives on in them. Or if

you spark an idea in the world, something lives on. Or if you identify it as a society around you because you are part of that, you'll not rest. This human being, yes. So in a sense, you are kind of like a Dalai Lama. And since that, you, Jascha

Bach, is just a collection of ideas. So like you have this operating system on which a bunch of ideas live and interact. And then once you die, they kind of part. Some of them jump off the show, you put it the other way. Identity is a

software state. It's a construction. It's not physically real. You know, identity is not a physical concept. It's basically a representation of different objects on the same world line. But identity lives and dies. Are you attached to this? It's what's the fundamental thing is

that the ideas that come together to form identity, or is each individual identity actually a fundamental thing? It's a representation that you can get agency over if you care. So basically, you can choose what you identify with if you want to know. But it just seems if if the

mind is not real, it's not that the birth and death is not a crucial part of it. Well, maybe I'm silly, maybe I'm attached to this whole biological organism. But it seems that the physical being, a physical object in this world, is is a an important aspect

of birth and death, like it feels like it has to be physical to die. It feels like simulations don't have to die. The physics that we experience is not the real physics that explains it. It's no color and sound in the real world. Color and sound are types of representations that

you get if you want to model reality with oscillators, right? So colors and sound in some sense have octaves, yes, and it's because they are represented properly with oscillators, right? So that's why colors form a circle of hues and colors have harmonic sounds.

have harmonics is a result of synchronizing oscillators in, in the brain, right? So the world that we subjectively interact with is fundamentally the result of the representation mechanisms in our brain. They are mathematically to some degree universal. There are certain regularities

that you can discover in the patterns and not others, but the patterns that we get, this is not the real world. The world that we interact with is always made of too many parts to count, right? So when you look at this table and so on, it's

consisting of so many more molecules and atoms that you cannot count them. So you only look at the aggregate dynamics at limit dynamics. If you had almost infinitely many patterns of particles, what would be the dynamics of the table? And this is roughly what you get. So

geometry that we are interacting with, this is the result of discovering those operators that work in the limit that you get by building an infinite series that converges for those parts where it converges is geometry. For those parts where it doesn't converge, chaos, right? And then so all that is filtered through

with the cuts of the consciousness that's emergent in our narrative the the consciousness gives it color gives a feeling gives a flavor so I think the feeling flavor and so on is given by the relationship that a feature has to all the other features it's basically a

giant relational graph that is our subjective universe the color is given by those aspects of the representation or the this exponential color where you care about but you have identifications but something means something where you are the inside of a feedback loop when the dimensions of of caring are

basically dimensions of this motivational system that we emerge over you

We exist inside the story that the brain tells itself (Joscha Bach) | AI Podcast Clips

Lex Fridman

Introduction to philosophical concepts and the nature of reality

Discussion of dualism, idealism, materialism, and functionalism.

Western philosophical trajectory influenced by a 2000-year-old cult.

Influence of this cult on societal interaction and rationality.

Comparison of the world to a multiplayer role-playing game; the concept of Maya.

Catholic introduction of higher meaning and the sacred; Platonic form of civilization.

The concept of God and the synchronization of minds

Catholic mythology as software implemented on people's minds.

God as a self existing across multiple brains; functional construction of self.

Brains downloading the same software and sharing it.

Shared space of ideas as the mind; separation from religious concepts.

Mind as separate from the real world where God exists; dualism.

Defining dualism, idealism, and materialism

Dualism: two substances (mental and physical) interacting by different rules.

Physical world as causally closed and mechanical; computational model.

Comparison to computer hardware and software; universal machine principle.

Materialism vs. Idealism: hardware vs. software; experiential world.

Idealism: mind as primary; Materialism: matter as primary.

The nature of consciousness and the narrative self

Idealism: material patterns as part of a mind's dream; Materialism: matter generating models.

Existence within a brain's narrative; inability of physical systems to experience.

Brain creating a simulacrum of a person to model interactions.

Brain continuously writing and updating a multimedia novel.

Question of what is real; the quantum graph and access to the story.

The nature of simulation and the limitations of perception

Engineering systems to produce observed phenomena; virtual world generated in the neocortex.

Indexicality and the virtual reality generated in the brain; comparison to the real world.

Donna Hoffman's view; distance between perceived and real world; Mandelbrot set analogy.

Mandelbrot set as an example of a fractal; living inside a fractal without access to its generator function.

Fundamental rules of the universe and the nature of consciousness

Possibility of discovering fundamental rules through automata and number theory.

Mathematics as the domain of all languages; category theory and mapping different domains.

Understanding the universe from first principles; Stephen Wolfram's work on cellular automata.

Consciousness as a simulated property; physical systems cannot be conscious.

The role of self in the simulation and the hard problem of consciousness

Mind as a principle producing simulation; software implemented by the brain.

Mind creating both the universe and the self; importance of the idea of self.

Self as a tool for modeling; regulation needs of organisms.

Regulation targets and priors; reverse-engineering and detailed models.

Consciousness emerging from disagreements with the universe; self as a result of identifications.

Addressing the consistency of the physical world within the simulation

No trick to the simulation; knowledge of self through modeling.

Consistency of the physical world; repeatable experiments and laws of physics.

Enduring phenomena as those with stable dynamics; weeding out unstable phenomena.

Complexity and control in regions of the universe sustaining minds.

Tightly controlled regions with symmetries and symmetry breaks.

The relationship between the brain, mind, and universe; death and identity

Connection between brain, mind, and broader universe; which comes first?

Universe as the starting point; easier to construct causal models.

What happens to the mind simulation when one dies; cessation of implementation.

Identity beyond constructed identity; the Dalai Lama as an example.

Ideas and traditions living on; identification with society.

Identity as a software state; not physically real; representation of objects.