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 can't 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 Catholic Church, 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 is that the world in which you and me 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 with 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 superorganism 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, they get this God online, and to make it efficient and effective. And I think God technically is just the self that spans 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 that is implemented by brains that exists across brains.

And this is a God with a small 'g.' That's one of the, if you are talking, this is one of the nice features of our brains, it seems, 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 ideas from Christianity, 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 co-author 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 the 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 soul 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.

And also, 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 very 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.

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 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 the software?

Not quite. 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.

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 thinks that matter is primary. And so for the idealist, the material patterns that we see playing and playing out are part of the dream that the mind is dreaming and it 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 as a dichotomy, but as two different aspects of the same thing.

So the real thing is, we don't exist in the physical world. We do exist inside of a story 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, your cannot feel anything.

Their 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, isn't 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 there's 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 Donald 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, a piece of architecture.

Imagine you look at the Mandelbrot fractal, 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 a series that is being tested for complex numbers, and in the complex number plane, for every point, and for those where this series is diverging, you will paint this black, and where it's converging, you don't.

And you get the intermediate colors by taking how fast 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, "Oh, I can see right now is the spiral, and this spiral moves a little bit to the right." Is this an accurate model of reality?

It is an adequate description. But you know that there is actually no spiral in the Mandelbrot fractal. It only appears 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 it currently observes, 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 universe of your entangled fence.

But you don't think the tools of 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 Mandelbrot fractal, and 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 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 there 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 principles that produce 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. These regulation targets start 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, things are not the way they should be, but you need to regulate.

And so in some sense, the sense 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, that 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 to a friend of mine, Gustavo Oström, who introduced me to your work.

He's a brilliant guy, and I think the AI community is actually quite amazing, and Gustav was a good representative of that.

You are as well. So 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 you've kind of described instead of this emergent phenomena of consciousness from the simulation.

So what about the hard problem of consciousness? 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, where the characters have plausible psychology, yeah, and they stand on a hill because they want to conquer the city below.

They own that. 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, almost a similar way as me. So there are internal states that are less accessible for me and that you have and so on.

And your 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, two puppets that enact this play in my mind. And I identify with one of them because I can 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.

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

Lex Fridman

Human consciousness is not an experience of the physical world but a simulation created by the brain that functions as a narrative to model and regulate our interactions with reality.

The feeling of being an individual 'self' is a software construct derived from the motivational feedback loops and identifications that the brain uses to manage its existence within a broader social and environmental context.

The physical world we perceive is a simplified model of reality generated through our brain's representational mechanisms, effectively acting as an interface that lacks the true underlying essence of the universe.

The Western understanding of reality has been profoundly shaped by **2,000 years of indoctrination, primarily by the Catholic Church**. While this has defined societal interactions, it has also, in some ways, 'scarred' our rationality, leading to a confused notion of reality.

This influence has led to an intuition that our everyday world is like a "multiplayer role-playing adventure," where objects and money are not truly real, akin to the Eastern concept of Maya. This involves **identifying with mundane existence, a concept similar to Samsara**, while also introducing the notion of a 'sacred' or higher meaning.

The idea of God, in this context, is seen as the Platonic form of a civilization, a superorganism formed by individuals acting as an intentional agent. The Catholic Church utilized a crude mythology to **implement and synchronize 'software' on people's minds**, essentially bringing this 'God' online for efficiency and effectiveness. This 'God' can be understood as a self spanning multiple brains, a feature of our brains allowing us to download and share a common piece of software or 'spec'.

This framework also introduces dualism, the idea that there's a mental realm (where God and our souls exist) separate from the physical realm. This often leads to a **confused understanding that connects materialism and idealism incorrectly**, suggesting a "real room" for our souls that gives us phenomenal experience.

In our cultural tradition, **dualism posits the existence of two distinct substances: a mental substance and a physical substance**, each governed by different rules. The physical world is considered causally closed and fundamentally mechanical or computational, where information flows according to physical laws, much like a computer's hardware.

Idealism, on the other hand, considers mind primary, viewing material patterns as part of a dream within a higher plane of existence. **Materialism believes only matter is primary**, generating models that result in our experience. However, these are not necessarily dichotomous but rather different aspects of the same underlying reality.

The only reality accessible to us is our experiential world, characterized by qualities like taste, color, and phenomenal content. This is distinct from the physical world, which is understood in abstract terms of cold patterns. The puzzle lies in **how physical phenomena give rise to subjective experience**.

Fundamentally, **we do not exist in the physical world but within a story that the brain tells itself**. Our brains cannot directly experience anything; instead, they create a 'simulacrum' of a person, a multimedia novel continuously written and updated, to model interactions and understand what it's like to be a conscious being.

As computer scientists, we can engineer systems with properties capable of producing the phenomena we observe: a self existing in a virtual world generated within the neocortex. This implies that **the world we perceive is not the 'real' physical world, but a virtual reality generated by our brains** to interpret sensory input.

The proximity of this internal model to external reality is a key question. Just as a Mandelbrot fractal, which is generated by simple code, presents complex patterns to an observer, **our perceived reality is an adequate but not entirely accurate model of its underlying generator function**. Zooming in or changing resolution can reveal different structures, implying our models are valid only at certain scales.

Our description of reality is reasonably predictive but **does not cut to the core of how it's generated**. To truly understand the universe, one would need to approach it from first principles, starting with automata and number theory. This echoes the belief that fundamental rules, akin to cellular automata, govern our universe.

A crucial insight is that **a physical system cannot be conscious; only a simulation can**. Consciousness is a simulated property, a self-simulated aspect of our minds. The mind itself is the software or principles that produce this simulation, creating both our perceived universe and the idea of 'self' embedded within it.

The 'self' is an important feature because it serves as a tool for modeling. We are not just monkeys, but side effects of the regulatory needs of organisms interacting with an outside world. Our minds develop regulation targets based on innate reflexes, creating **increasingly detailed models of the world and our interaction with it**.

Consciousness emerges from our disagreements with the universe, from things we care about that are not as they should be. The sense of self is a result of our identifications—the regulation trackers or dimensions we commit to. **Letting go of these identifications can lead to freedom, even to a state of Nirvana**.

The 'hard problem' of consciousness—why the simulation feels like something—can be understood by analogy with a story. Characters in a novel have emotions and motivations because they are written into the narrative. Similarly, **our brain's story, written in perceptual multimedia content, models what a person would feel if they existed**.

We, as individuals, are these virtual persons. Even in interaction, another person exists as a puppet within one's own mind's play. While we can control our own 'puppet' directly, and even form feedback loops for shared experiences, **this coupling is a software phenomenon, not physical**.

The question of why our mind doesn't have access to another's full state is because **our mind doesn't even have access to its own full state; it relies on creating models of itself**. The consistent, repeatable nature of the physical world, described by laws of physics, fits into this by acknowledging that stable dynamics are crucial for systems that sustain complexity, such as minds.

In a universe that allows for the implementation of minds like ours, it must be a region that is **tightly controlled and controllable, exhibiting interesting symmetries and symmetry breaks**. The universe is the starting point, and minds are emergent, a more straightforward causal explanation than the reverse.

Upon death, the implementation of one's mind ceases. However, if one's 'identity'—a software state, not physically real—is implemented in the minds of others or through concepts like tradition (as with the Dalai Lama), **aspects of that identity can persist beyond the physical body**. We are all, to some extent, like this, with ideas and influences living on through children, creations, or societal identifications.

The subjective world we experience, with color and sound, is fundamentally a result of our brain's representation mechanisms. These sensory experiences are types of representations for modeling reality with oscillators, giving rise to phenomena like the circle of hues and harmonic sounds. Our interaction with reality is always with an aggregate or **limit dynamics of too many parts to count, filtered through the emergent narrative of consciousness**.

Feelings and flavors are derived from the relational graph of our subjective universe, where features are defined by their relationships to others. **Color, for instance, arises from aspects of representation where we have identifications**, where something holds meaning and connects to our motivational system.

How does the speaker differentiate between the 'physical world' and the 'mental realm,' and why does he argue that labeling them as separate substances is a confused notion?

In what way does the speaker describe the 'self' as a simulation or a story that the brain tells itself, rather than an objective, fundamental reality?

How does the speaker use the analogy of the Mandelbrot fractal to explain our relationship to the objective universe and the limitations of our scientific models?

According to the speaker, what is the role of 'identifications' and feedback loops in the creation of consciousness, and how does this relate to the concept of finding freedom or 'Nirvana'?

What is the speaker's perspective on the relationship between consciousness and physical systems, specifically regarding the claim that 'a physical system cannot be conscious'?

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.

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

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