Lex Fridman Podcast: #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality

Joscha Bach is the VP of Research at the AI Foundation, previously doing research at MIT and Harvard. Joscha work explores the workings of the human mind, intelligence, consciousness, life on Earth, and the possibly-simulated fabric of our universe.

Support this podcast by supporting these sponsors:

– ExpressVPN at https://www.expressvpn.com/lexpod

– Cash App – use code “LexPodcast” and download:

– Cash App (App Store): https://apple.co/2sPrUHe

– Cash App (Google Play): https://bit.ly/2MlvP5w

This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon.

Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

OUTLINE:

00:00 – Introduction

03:14 – Reverse engineering Joscha Bach

10:38 – Nature of truth

18:47 – Original thinking

23:14 – Sentience vs intelligence

31:45 – Mind vs Reality

46:51 – Hard problem of consciousness

51:09 – Connection between the mind and the universe

56:29 – What is consciousness

1:02:32 – Language and concepts

1:09:02 – Meta-learning

1:16:35 – Spirit

1:18:10 – Our civilization may not exist for long

1:37:48 – Twitter and social media

1:44:52 – What systems of government might work well?

1:47:12 – The way out of self-destruction with AI

1:55:18 – AI simulating humans to understand its own nature

2:04:32 – Reinforcement learning

2:09:12 – Commonsense reasoning

2:15:47 – Would AGI need to have a body?

2:22:34 – Neuralink

2:27:01 – Reasoning at the scale of neurons and societies

2:37:16 – Role of emotion

2:48:03 – Happiness is a cookie that your brain bakes for itself