How a Spiritual Worldview Explains Consciousness - Joscha Bach

Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist and AI researcher.

Animism is the view that everything in the universe is alive and conscious. Is such a worldview absurd? Or might it help make sense of life, evolution, and consciousness?

In this podcast, learn how Joscha came to understand spirits as "self-organizing software agents", how life is animated by non-physical software patterns, how non-physical patterns animate societies, as well as where emotions actually come from, the nature of consciousness, the future of AI consciousness, God and the deep nature of ultimate reality, and more...

Timestamps:
00:00 Joscha's Realization about Spirits
04:16 Software & Brains
07:08 Mind vs. Brain
12:04 Where are Spirits before Incarnation?
14:20 Software at Different Layers of Reality
18:14 Ghosts
22:42 Humans vs. Computers
26:39 Artificial Intelligence
28:45 The Hard Problem of Consciousness
29:05 Understanding Consciousness and Its Implications
32:05 The Nature of Consciousness
36:52 Emotions, God, & The Outer Mind
41:48 Hemispheric Differences in the Brain
45:45 Conscious AI
48:30 Collective Agents and Societal Dynamics
52:38 Metaphysics & God
53:30 Martyrs in Cells and Humans
59:10 Origins of Reality

Find Joscha:
X: https://x.com/Plinz

California Institute for Machine Consciousness: https://cimc.ai/
Liquid AI: https://www.liquid.ai/



Find Jack:
Substack: https://substack.com/@jackroycroftsherry
X: https://x.com/jack_roycroft