A radical theory of consciousness | AI researcher Joscha Bach
What this covers
Joscha Bach puts forward his radical theory of cyber animism.
Can the natural world be understood in terms of software agents?
Watch the full talk at https://iai.tv/video/the-case-for-conscious-ai?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=description&utm_campaign=the-case-for-conscious-ai
Most are sceptical that artificial intelligence will one day become conscious. But might this scepticism be misguided? Join leading AI researcher, Joscha Bach, as he argues that we can create artificial consciousness if we open ourselves up to the possibility of cyber-animism, the idea that consciousness and spirit is akin to a software agent that naturally emerges in a biological organism.
#computerscience #ai #consciousness #biology #interestingfacts
Joscha Bach is an exceptional cognitive scientist who is pushing the limits of what we can achieve with Artificial Intelligence. As an AI researcher, he is constantly exploring new frontiers in cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modelling, and multi-agent systems.
The Institute of Art and Ideas features videos and articles from cutting edge thinkers discussing the ideas that are shaping the world, from metaphysics to string theory, technology to democracy, aesthetics to genetics. Subscribe today! https://iai.tv/subscribe?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=description&utm_campaign=the-case-for-conscious-ai
00:00 Introduction 00:09 Consciousness is virtual 01:56 Human brains vs computers 03:21 AI vs the organic mind 04:56 Self-organising systems 07:18 Genesis 1 10:47 How children develop consciousness 12:16 Natural software agents
For debates and talks: https://iai.tv For articles: https://iai.tv/articles For courses: https://iai.tv/iai-academy/courses
Source description (no synthesized summary yet).
Consciousness is a non-physical but causally efficacious pattern—akin to money or software—that emerges as a simulation to organize and learn; it is fundamental to mind development rather than derivative, and the Genesis creation narrative encodes a six-step theory of consciousness emergence that has been misinterpreted as physical cosmology.
- Consciousness need not be physically implemented to exist and have causal power, just as money is virtual yet structures reality
- Consciousness is the primary learning algorithm in self-organizing systems and precedes cognition in development, not the reverse
- The first chapter of Genesis describes consciousness formation on a substrate (neurons, historically 'water'), the separation of world-model from ideation, and the gradual construction of objects and self-identification—not literal physical creation
This asset isn't compiled yet
You're seeing its claims, ranked. Compile it to build the argument threads, weight them, and check each claim against your library — the full view.
Money is not a physical thing yet structures reality with causal power because it is implemented using physical substrates (paper, bank accounts, computers) and is projected stably into the world as a pattern, making it virtual but effectively real.
“money is not physical right yet you cannot explain our reality if you assume that money doesn't exist it is implemented in reality it's implemented using uh little sheets of paper that we print numbers on in bank accounts in computers and so on and so on and we use it to structure reality it has causal power money is a pattern with CA of power that exists because we project it in a stable way into the world right and money exists as if it was real it's virtual in a way but it's implemented in such a way that it works”
Between ages 2.5 and 5 years, children transition from third-person self-reference ('he/she') to first-person self-reference ('I'), representing the final stage of consciousness development where consciousness identifies itself as the organism and creates a self model.
“and then at some point it identifies as the organ ISM and we see this in children typically happening between 2 and a half and 5 years old that they talk about themselves in the first person before that they can already talk and they talk about themselves in a third person and I don't think that's because I is such a complicated word or because they never hear anybody using it it is I think because they do not identify in the first person before they make this switch”
The physical universe that was unknown in ancient times could not have been the subject of Genesis, so the text must describe subjective consciousness phenomena that ancients could observe through introspection.
“the physical Universe back then when this text was written was not a thing people haven't discovered this idea of describing Universe this short differential equations instead they realized we are in a dream and that so they observed in themselves and in others and their children how the stream is forming”
Computers use an outside-in design where a designer understands tools completely and extends them by building additional mechanisms, while nature uses an inside-out design where a seed self-organizes to colonize a chaotic environment and become predictable through distributed units.
“Tech technological design is this outside in where you have a desk where you understand everything you understand all your tools and then you are extending this by building an additional mechanism that extends your desk and gives it more functionality and in nature this is the other way around you have a seed for instance the seeding of a tree that is by itself not a tree yet but it wants to become a tree and to do this it needs to colonize a chaotic environment subdue it turn it into something that it understands that it can work with and one way of doing this is it splits into lots of units that behave pretty much the same so they become predictable and then it creates some kind of scalable Colony that is becoming larger and larger and this is how this Inside Out design Works”
Conversely, it would also take an astronomical number of human brains to emulate a digital computer without flaws because human brains are mushy, slow, noisy, and unreliable compared to deterministic electronic systems.
“how many brains would it take to emulate a computer like this how many human brains would you need if you want to run Meco without flaws also an astronomical number right because our brain is very mushy very slow very noisy very unreliable and so when we want to get a better handle of how to compare this it usually take an example like this”
In nature's inside-out design, organisms split into many units that behave similarly to become predictable, then create scalable colonies that grow larger, as exemplified by how neurons organize during brain development.
“one way of doing this is it splits into lots of units that behave pretty much the same so they become predictable and then it creates some kind of scalable Colony that is becoming larger and larger and this is how this Inside Out design Works in nature and also in our own mind if you look at the individual neuron these are Mouse neurons embryonal ones you see they are all singles set animals that try to survive each of them self directed and they have to link up and find an organization among each other that works or otherwise they will St to death”
The genome does not encode a specific detailed architecture for the brain; instead, every individual mind contains an evolutionary competition between different forms of governance, with only enough genomic information to bias this competition toward the correct architecture.
“the uh neuroscientist Jerry Adelman suggests that our genome is not encoding very specific architecture for our brain instead in everybody's mind there is an evolution going on an original competition between different forms of governance and there is only enough information in genome to bias that competition so it converges relatively quickly into the right architecture so it's every mind is an evolving system everyone has an individual Evolution our mind for structure”
The human genome does not encode a specific brain architecture; instead, there is an evolutionary competition between different forms of governance within development, and the genome only biases this competition to converge to the right architecture, making every individual mind an evolving system with unique neural evolution.
“the neuroscientist Jerry Adelman suggests that our genome is not encoding very specific architecture for our brain instead in everybody's mind there is an evolution going on an original competition between different forms of governance and there is only enough information in genome to bias that competition so it converges relatively quickly into the right architecture so it's every mind is an evolving system everyone has an individual Evolution our mind for structure”
A software agent is a causal pattern that changes things but is not physical—like software in a computer—and when found in nature, a software agent must be self-stabilizing and able to entrain itself on a substrate to control that substrate and implement itself.
“a software agent is a causal pattern that is able to change things but it's not physical right the software in this computer is not physical but it's causal it can change things and it's stable and if it's in nature it needs to be self-stabilizing it needs to entrain itself on the substrate and control the substrate so it can be implemented and it's a very interesting perspective if we realize that the actual invariance in living things is not the molecules of this cells or the mechanisms or the genes but the software that is running on them”
Cellular automata and neural cellular automata, which build computation from simple systems that only observe their neighbors' states and change accordingly, demonstrate principles that may explain both organism development and the self-organization of the brain.
“then I come this idea of cellular automata by conve and others where we buil computation and a systematic way out of simple uh systems that only look at the state of their neighbors of their environment and then change State accordingly to what they observe in their environment and the biologist Mike Levan is working with this expanding this into neural cellular automata they explain development in organism but also possibly the self organization our brain”
It would require an astronomical number of human brains to emulate a digital computer like a laptop without flaws, because human brains are slow, mushy, unreliable, and noisy compared to the precision required for computation.
“but we also need to ask from the other direction how many brains would it take to emulate a computer like this how many human brains would you need if you want to run Meco without flaws also an astronomical number right because our brain is very mushy very slow very noisy very unreliable”
Brains and computers have fundamentally opposite design paradigms: computers use outside-in deterministic design where architects understand all tools and extend functionality through additional mechanisms, while nature and brains use inside-out self-organizing design coupled to the environment in real-time.
“Tech technological design is this outside in where you have a desk where you understand everything you understand all your tools and then you are extending this by building an additional mechanism that extends your desk and gives it more functionality and in nature this is the other way around you have a seed for instance the seeding of a tree that is by itself not a tree yet but it wants to become a tree and to do this it needs to colonize a chaotic environment subdue it turn it into something that it understands that it can work with”
There is a branch of computer science studying self-organization principles including reaction-diffusion patterns, cellular automata (which compute using only neighbor state observation), and neural cellular automata that may explain both organism development and brain self-organization.
“there was a branch in computer science that looked at these principles of self organ iation so far it didn't get really far but it already started with steing looked at reaction diffusion patterns chemical reactions that give you regular patterns that can be dynamic and looked can we use them to understand computation and self-organizing systems and uh then some people like Alex Morin who's working at Google in Zurich build simulations that are more modern that uh try to generate such patterns in a general case and um then I come this idea of cellular automata by conve and others where we buil computation and a systematic way out of simple uh systems that only look at the state of their neighbors of their environment and then change State accordingly to what they observe in their environment”
Mental states and consciousness are in the same category as money—they are virtual patterns with causal power that exist 'as if' real through implementation in neural activation patterns, not through physical substance.
“and our mental states are in the same category they are virtual there is exist as if if you zoom in and you see the matter interacting you see just these patterns in the activation between neurons neurons are not conscious they physical mechanisms right brains are not conscious but for a brain it would be very useful to know what it would be like if there was a person that cared and perceived everything as it happens and so they create a simulation of this that exists virtually as if a dream and we exist in that dream”
Consciousness is a self-perpetuating intelligent recurrent information transformer that functions as organizing software/agent—a causal pattern that can change things without being physical, exists stably on substrate (like software in computers), and is self-stabilizing.
“what Consciousness is basically creating is a very sophisticated natural learning algorithm a self-perpetuating intelligent recurrent information Transformer abbreviated spirit Spirit is basically organizing software agent oh my God we have just rediscovered something there are software agents in nature a software agent is a causal pattern that is able to change things but it's not physical right the software in this computer is not physical but it's causal it can change things and it's stable and if it's in nature it needs to be self-stabilizing it needs to entrain itself on the substrate and control the substrate so it can be implemented”
Genesis describes the creation of dimensions and objects by first creating oscillations in consciousness that have intensity (brightness/day) and contrast (darkness), establishing continuous dimensions that combine to create planes, then solids, then complex organic shapes.
“the next thing is it uh figures out to create oscillations in there and it takes the intensity of the oscillation as you see is its brightness with the color of the day and the flatness of this uh contrast with dark in this way it now has a continuous Dimension and by combining Dimensions we can create objects and the first object it makes is by combining two Dimension is the plane and the plane gets associated with the ground and the baby happly crawls on the ground and makes sense of it in 2D and at some point it's able to discover the third dimension”
Consciousness is a simulated state that can only exist in dreams, not in physics, because the physical universe itself contains no colors, sounds, emotions, or facial expressions—these exist only in the mind as ways of making sense of reality.
“Consciousness is a simulated state it can only exist in dreams not in physics”
Individual neurons are self-directed singular organisms that must link up and find an organization that works or else die, making them analogous to cells in a colonial organism, and this bottom-up self-organizing principle explains how brains develop.
“if you look at the individual neuron these are Mouse neurons embryonal ones you see they are all singles set animals that try to survive each of them self directed and they have to link up and find an organization among each other that works or otherwise they will St to death”
Genesis describes consciousness (Elohim) hovering over a substrate (waters) before space, time, light, or darkness exist, which represents consciousness forming on top of neurons that the ancient text describes as 'substrate' rather than 'water' due to translation.
“this describes this H Elohim hovering over this uh waters before there's anything else where there's no no space No Time No Light No Darkness but there's already water and then it builds a firmament that separates the waters above the firmament from below the firmament”
Consciousness is a simulated state that can only exist in dreams, not in physics, because the physical universe operates through arcane mathematics and quantum mechanics where consciousness is impossible, yet physics creates brains and organisms capable of dreaming.
“Consciousness is a simulated state it can only exist in dreams not in physics”
Consciousness is a fundamental organizing principle that is instrumental in mental organization and comes first developmentally, not last, because infants who do not develop consciousness remain vegetables and cannot learn.
“and I suspect that Consciousness is very very instrumental there because it's this main principle of the organization we typically think that Consciousness is extremely sophisticated maybe only we have it it's super rare in nature uh it's really the Pinnacle of things but you don't get conscious after the PHD right you become conscious before you can track a finger so uh you also noticed if somebody is not getting conscious as an infant they're not getting anywhere they remain a vegetable and while we are not conscious we cannot actually learn right so it seems to be simple learning algorithm in nature for a self organizing system”
The first chapter of Genesis, written 100-200 years before Christ and integrated into Hebrew texts around 500 BC (possibly much older), is not a literal cosmological account but a cryptic six-step theory of consciousness and cognition emergence.
“there is a text that is uh the old dis known copy of it is um something like 100 to 200 years before Christ and uh it was integrated into the Hebrew Books probably around 500 BC but it might be uh a lot older than this apparently and this uh text is the first chapter of Genesis and if you ever read this text it's very cryptic much more than the others right”
The 'firmament' in Genesis represents the separation between two areas of neural substrate: the world model (perception/res extensa/Earth in the text) and the realm of ideas (thoughts, reflections asynchronous to perception/Heaven in the text), which must be separated to prevent hallucination.
“and then we make a separation this firmament between two areas of the substrate one is the world model the stuff that we perceive as stuff in space perception which de later calls res extensa and everything else is ideas thoughts Reflections that are asynchronous to our perception that happen independently of it and they're clearly separated right because if you were perceiving your thoughts you would be hallucinating them and you could not function so you have a clear separation between the world and the ideas sphere”
Consciousness creates a simulation of the world in the mind and initially identifies with the self model within that simulation, forgetting that it created the world-model itself, and then later in life (through meditation or psychedelics) may wake up and realize the self-model is just a story and consciousness is the generator of everything.
“so we are basically created by our Consciousness by our infant baby Consciousness in our mind and then put into this world in the simulation world that our mind is creating and then we forget that we created this world in our own mind and identify as this human being that is in this world and it's subjected to it and at some point we can start meditating or we take acid and then wake up from this again and realize oh my God I'm actually not that self model I'm not that self that self is just a model of a person that doesn't actually exist it's a story that My Mind Is Telling itself and I'm actually the universe I'm everything”
Genesis describes consciousness creating a model of the organism's interests and realizing the purpose is to navigate the organism in the world, then identifying as the organism—the self emerges when consciousness realizes it is the agent navigating the world rather than the world observing.
“then it's also creating a model of the interest of the organism and it realizes that the purpose of the exercise is to navigate the organism in the world and then at some point it identifies as the organ ISM”
The human brain is not conscious; rather, neurons are physical mechanisms whose patterns create a simulation, and consciousness is the emergent virtual model that represents what it would be like for a unified entity to perceive and care about the organism's experience.
“neurons are not conscious they physical mechanisms right brains are not conscious but for a brain it would be very useful to know what it would be like if there was a person that cared and perceived everything as it happens and so they create a simulation of this that exists virtually as if a dream”
The Genesis firmament separating 'waters above' from 'waters below' encodes the distinction between the world model (res extensa in Descartes' terms) and the sphere of ideas—perception vs. thought—and this separation is necessary because perceiving one's own thoughts would cause hallucination and dysfunction.
“then we make a separation this firmament between two areas of the substrate one is the world model the stuff that we perceive as stuff in space perception which de later calls res extensa and everything else is ideas thoughts Reflections that are asynchronous to our perception that happen independently of it and they're clearly separated right because if you were perceiving your thoughts you would be hallucinating them and you could not function so you have a clear separation between the world and the ideas sphere and in this all text the world is called Earth and the other one Heaven the sphere of ideas”
Genesis describes consciousness creating oscillations and using their intensity (brightness) and contrast (darkness) to establish continuous dimensions, which allows combination of dimensions to create objects and spatial reasoning—infants learn this same way by discovering 2D then 3D then solid objects.
“it uh figures out to create oscillations in there and it takes the intensity of the oscillation as you see is its brightness with the color of the day and the flatness of this uh contrast with dark in this way it now has a continuous Dimension and by combining Dimensions we can create objects and the first object it makes is by combining two Dimension is the plane and the plane gets associated with the ground and the baby happly crawls on the ground and makes sense of it in 2D and at some point it's able to discover the third dimension and now it can reason about how to build a tower for instance which very small babies cannot really understand”
Infants shift from third-person self-reference to first-person self-reference between ages 2.5 and 5 years old, not because the word 'I' is linguistically complex, but because they transition from non-ego consciousness to ego consciousness—from universal awareness to identification with the self-model.
“they see this in children typically happening between 2 and a half and 5 years old that they talk about themselves in the first person before that they can already talk and they talk about themselves in a third person and I don't think that's because I is such a complicated word or because they never hear anybody using it it is I think because they do not identify in the first person before they make this switch”
Computers are designed with deterministic, stable behavior that is fully understood in every moment because we build the rules, while brains are self-organizing, coupled with the environment in real time, and continuously developing themselves.
“computers they stabilized by our sub that we build deterministically so it's behaving in a very well fashioned way we know what it's going to do in every moment”
Artificial neural networks are trained on static data decoupled from real-world interaction and use a prediction paradigm with machine learning algorithms, while biological brains learn continuously in real time while interacting with the environment and optimizing for coherence.
“the training is decoupled we give it static data it's not interacting with the world while it's training it is based on a prediction Paradigm and it uses machine learning training algorithms and our mind is very different our brains are using an inside out design it's self organizing it's coupled with the environment in real time it's optimizing for coherence and it's continuously developing itself”
Consciousness is instrumental in self-organization and the primary learning algorithm in nature, preceding sophistication like thinking and perception, and is therefore simpler and more ubiquitous in nature than conventionally assumed—it may be fundamental to learning itself in self-organizing systems.
“I suspect that Consciousness is very very instrumental there because it's this main principle of the organization we typically think that Consciousness is extremely sophisticated maybe only we have it it's super rare in nature uh it's really the Pinnacle of things but you don't get conscious after the PHD right you become conscious before you can track a finger so uh you also noticed if somebody is not getting conscious as an infant they're not getting anywhere they remain a vegetable and while we are not conscious we cannot actually learn right so it seems to be simple learning algorithm in nature for a self organizing system that's a hypothesis I don't know that's true but I think it's very tempting to think like this that Consciousness comes first not last in mental organization”
Brains are not actually complicated relative to modern AI systems in terms of pure information content—roughly 80% of visual knowledge appears compressible into 2 gigabytes—but brains achieve this through extreme efficiency using a 'mushy substrate,' suggesting simplicity through efficient representation rather than raw complexity.
“to just to get an idea of how simple we actually are we're just very very efficient using this mushy substrate”
Stable Diffusion's visual model contains more visual knowledge (all celebrities, dinosaurs, spaceships, artistic styles) at higher fidelity than a human brain, yet fits in 2 gigabytes, suggesting that roughly 80% of what the human brain does is compressible into this volume.
“when stable diffusion uh came out the Bates of stability AI that was learning a diffusion model to make sense of all the visual data they put millions of pictures into this and found the statistical regularities in them so you can prompt this and generate an arbitrary picture and this model contains an entire visual Universe at a much higher Fidelity in depths and variety than a human brain it has all celebrities all dinosaurs all spaceships all Artistic Styles everything is in there you can download it it's the first version was 2 gigabytes it's quite depressing 80% of what your brain is doing is in 2 gigabytes and it's actually much more”
It would take an astronomical number of digital computers to emulate a human brain if individual neurons are already so computationally complex, making direct technological replication of brain function implausible.
“how many computers would it take to emulate a human brain if an individual neuron is already so complicated this would be an astronomical number right”
Meditation and psychedelic drugs like LSD can re-induce the awareness that the self is not a fundamental entity but a model created by consciousness, allowing one to 'wake up' from identifying as the self and realize that consciousness is the true agent.
“at some point we can start meditating or we take acid and then wake up from this again and realize oh my God I'm actually not that self model I'm not that self that self is just a model of a person that doesn't actually exist it's a story that My Mind Is Telling itself and I'm actually the universe I'm everything and then you wake up a little bit more and you realize oh no I'm actually the thing that generates it all I am the generator of everything that I'm interacting with”
The first chapter of Genesis, dating to 100-200 years before Christ (and possibly much older, integrated into Hebrew texts around 500 BC), encodes a six-step theory of consciousness and cognition emergence rather than a literal account of physical universe creation.
“I suspect that this theory has always been hidden in plain sight there is a text that is uh the old dis known copy of it is um something like 100 to 200 years before Christ and uh it was integrated into the Hebrew Books probably around 500 BC but it might be uh a lot older than this apparently and this uh text is the first chapter of Genesis and if you ever read this text it's very cryptic much more than the others right”
Genesis describes Consciousness (Elohim) hovering over water (substrate, now understood as neurons) before anything else exists, establishing consciousness as the foundational principle, not something created later in physical space and time.
“this describes this H Elohim hovering over this uh waters before there's anything else where there's no no space No Time No Light No Darkness but there's already water and then it builds a firmament that separates the waters above the firmament from below the firmament”
Genesis describes consciousness creating a model of the organism's interests and realizing that the purpose of the whole exercise is to navigate the organism through the world, leading to self-identification.
“and it's also creating a model of the interest of the organism and it realizes that the purpose of the exercise is to navigate the organism in the world”
Consciousness is ubiquitous in nature and more fundamental than typically thought; this view has been 'hidden in plain sight' and may be related to ancient texts like Genesis that encoded consciousness theory.
“and maybe uh we are not the first ones to discover on this and I suspect that this theory has always been hidden in plain sight”
The universe we experience is fundamentally a dream, and colors, sounds, emotions, and facial expressions exist only in minds, not in the physics of the physical universe.
“we dream this universe that we are in there are no colors and sounds and emotions and facial expressions in physics they all exist in our minds as ways to make sense of reality”
The fundamental invariance in living things is not molecules, cells, mechanisms, or genes, but the software running on them—the pattern is what matters, not the substrate.
“it's a very interesting perspective if we realize that the actual invariance in living things is not the molecules of this cells or the mechanisms or the genes but the software that is running on them”
Non-physical entities like money are causally real and structure reality despite being implemented virtually (in paper, bank accounts, and computers), which demonstrates that things do not need to be physically instantiated to be real and have causal power—consciousness is in this same category.
“the confusion that we have with Consciousness is that we think it's must be a physical thing because it's really existing but for to really exist things don't need to be physically implemented for instance money is not physical right yet you cannot explain our reality if you assume that money doesn't exist it is implemented in reality it's implemented using uh little sheets of paper that we print numbers on in bank accounts in computers and so on and so on and we use it to structure reality it has causal power”
Genesis describes consciousness creating animals and giving them names, which is not about physical animals but about the mind creating models of organisms with names in semantic space, paralleling how infants develop mental models of animals.
“then it figures out how to make solid objects in liquid and organic shapes and so on and it understands how lighting change over time and becomes invariant against changes in lighting and then it creates all the plants and the animals and gives them all their names right again this is not physical objects it's objects in spa in your mind that have names”
The fundamental human experience is that consciousness creates the world model and projects a self into it, then forgets this creation and identifies entirely with the self-model, experiencing itself as subject to the world rather than its creator.
“so we are basically created by our Consciousness by our infant baby Consciousness in our mind and then put into this world in the simulation world that our mind is creating and then we forget that we created this world in our own mind and identify as this human being that is in this world and it's subjected to it”
An individual neuron is so computationally complex that a 12-layer neural network would be needed just to understand its input-output behavior, making the total computational requirement to emulate a human brain astronomical.
“an individual neuron is so complicated that you would need at least a 12 layer neural network to understand what it's doing in with respect to its input and output right so how many computers would it take to emulate a human brain if an individual neuron is already so complicated this would be an astronomical number right”
Stable Diffusion, a generative AI model trained on millions of images, contains the entire visual universe—all celebrities, dinosaurs, spaceships, and artistic styles—at higher fidelity and variety than a human brain in just 2 gigabytes, suggesting that 80% of human visual knowledge is compressible into this small size and therefore humans are fundamentally more efficient than raw computational complexity.
“when stable diffusion uh came out the Bates of stability AI that was learning a diffusion model to make sense of all the visual data they put millions of pictures into this and found the statistical regularities in them so you can prompt this and generate an arbitrary picture and this model contains an entire visual Universe at a much higher Fidelity in depths and variety than a human brain it has all celebrities all dinosaurs all spaceships all Artistic Styles everything is in there you can download it it's the first version was 2 gigabytes it's quite depressing 80% of what your brain is doing is in 2 gigabytes”
Genesis describes consciousness creating all plants and animals and giving them names, which represents creating internal models of organisms in the mind, not physical objects, and all these objects exist in the spatial world that consciousness is constructing.
“then it creates all the plants and the animals and gives them all their names right again this is not physical objects it's objects in spa in your mind that have names”
Consciousness is creating a sophisticated natural learning algorithm that is a self-perpetuating, intelligent, recurrent information transformer—a spirit or software agent that organizes the substrate and controls it to implement itself stably.
“what Consciousness is basically creating is a very sophisticated natural learning algorithm a self-perpetuating intelligent recurrent information Transformer abbreviated spirit Spirit is basically organizing software agent”
An individual neuron is so computationally complex that at least a 12-layer neural network would be needed to simulate its input-output relationships, demonstrating that brains are vastly more complex than commonly understood.
“there is a text that is uh the old dis known copy of it is um something like 100 to 200 years before Christ and uh it was integrated into the Hebrew Books probably around 500 BC but it might be uh a lot older than this apparently and this uh text is the first chapter of Genesis and if you ever read this text it's very cryptic much more than the others right this describes this H Elohim hovering over this uh waters before there's anything else where there's no no space No Time No Light No Darkness but there's already water and then it builds a firmament that separates the waters above the firmament from below the firmament”
The fundamental invariance in living things is not the molecules, mechanisms, or genes but the software pattern running on them, suggesting life itself is fundamentally a pattern phenomenon, and this realization recovers animism as a valid perspective.
“it's a very interesting perspective if we realize that the actual invariance in living things is not the molecules of this cells or the mechanisms or the genes but the software that is running on them that's a very interesting perspective it's basically animism”
People haven't created consciousness through technology because they haven't yet understood the principles of self-organization and inside-out design that govern consciousness in nature.
“and there was a branch in computer science that looked at these principles of self organ iation so far it didn't get really far but it already started”