About
Joscha Bach is an AI researcher and cognitive scientist known for his work on cognitive architectures and the nature of mind. His MicroPsi project models motivation, emotion, and cognition in artificial agents. Bach offers a unique perspective on consciousness and intelligence, arguing that minds are self-organizing patterns in information processing systems. His talks blend computer science, philosophy, and psychology to explore how minds—artificial or biological—might actually work.
Key Contributions
- Developed MicroPsi, a cognitive architecture modeling perception, motivation, emotion, and action in artificial agents
- Wrote 'Principles of Synthetic Intelligence,' turning motivated cognition into a detailed architecture rather than a metaphor
- Argues that minds are self-modeling information processes, connecting AI design to theories of consciousness
- Offers one of the clearest public syntheses of cognitive architectures, symbolic systems, and modern machine learning
- Treats AGI as an engineering and philosophy problem, not only a scaling problem
- His explanations are unusually accessible, though the breadth of the synthesis sometimes outruns empirical consensus
Questions they sharpened View the streams
What is computation?
Computation is not something minds use. It is what minds are — patterns implementing themselves.
Can a tool want anything?
2009A system genuinely wants when wanting is built into its architecture — intrinsic drives that organize perception and action, not a reward number bolted on. MicroPsi models motivation as structure, so 'wanting' stops being a metaphor.
Could an LLM be conscious?
2024A physical system can't be conscious — only a simulation can. The brain runs a self-model, and consciousness is that model perceiving its own perceiving. So the substrate question is the wrong one: ask whether the system builds the right virtual self.
Is the mind computational?
2024We are all software. The mind is computational — but the relevant computation is a self-organizing pattern that writes itself, not a fixed program someone loads. 'You' are the running pattern, not the hardware it runs on.
What is a self?
2024You are a story the brain tells itself — a self-model it builds to organize perception and action. Useful, revisable, and not identical to the system that runs it. The 'I' is content, not the computer.
What is consciousness?
2024Consciousness is a coherence-inducing operator — a second-order perception the mind uses to bind its own states into a single now. It's software the brain runs, not a substance it secretes.
Why does it feel like anything?
2024The feeling is second-order perception — a system perceiving its own perceiving. Qualia aren't an extra substance; they're the format in which a self-model renders its own states to itself.
Books
Close Listening
Where Magic Is PossibleConsciousness is a property of a simulation, not of physics, so a machine can have it, but text that reads as conscious proves nothing. Joscha Bach in Berlin, from agents on a secret message board to coherence, the streetlight, simulated water and computational functionalism.What Would It Mean for a Machine to Be Conscious? — Joscha Bach
Written in the StoryThe world we live in is a dream the brain weaves, and we are characters inside it; what remains is what in the dream is real. Joscha Bach and John Vervaeke on Theories of Everything, from faces that aren't there to software as a physical law.Joscha Bach Λ John Vervaeke: Mind, Idealism, Computation
What If There Is No Hard ProblemConsciousness may be a simple trick a self-organizing learner discovers: a model of its own perceiving, marked as real. Joscha Bach with Tim Scarfe on Machine Learning Street Talk, from Leibniz's mill to a dream of chocolate.Why Leibniz Couldn't Find the Mind Inside the Mill (Joscha Bach)Videos & Interviews
Joscha Bach Λ Ben Goertzel: Conscious Ai, LLMs, AGI
A two-hour 'theolocution' on Theories of Everything whose real shape emerges an hour in, when Bach observes that the two of them 'mostly agree except for crypto' — and names the one deep split: Goertzel is a panpsychist, and Bach cannot formalize panpsychism in a way that differs from plain functionalism. Goertzel's reply is nearly Zen: he doesn't know how to formalize the claim that some things lie beyond all formalization. Along the way they trade Peirce's categories, an anesthetic-based definition of consciousness, and a surprisingly convergent view of LLMs — Goertzel concedes they learn real abstractions, but wants them as subsidiary components of a hybrid AGI, never the hub.
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Joscha Bach — Consciousness Builds the Mind
Bach in conversation with Wolf Tivy of The Students, arguing that consciousness may be a convergent strategy for organizing minds — human and machine alike. From his computational functionalist model of consciousness and the "self-organizing seed", the discussion escalates to whether powerful AI minds will resolve conflicts by merging or by fighting, the singleton question, and what "aligned AI" means for liberty.
View Details Joscha Bach Λ John Vervaeke: Mind, Idealism, Computation
A three-hour 'theolocution' on Theories of Everything, hosted by Curt Jaimungal, in which the two cognitive scientists find they disagree far less than either expected. Bach argues that the world we experience is not the physical world but a model the brain builds: sky and ground, faces and colours exist in the mind, "physical systems cannot be conscious," and only simulated things can be. Vervaeke keeps pressing on the word "real": if everything is a projection, what lets us call anything a projection, and why should the cup, the physicist and the instruments be less real than the physics they produce? They meet in Platonism, where an archetype is the most elegant optimum of a description, and Vervaeke calls himself a Neoplatonist. The second half turns to the meaning crisis: Vervaeke cares less about what people believe than what they practise, while Bach thinks the civilization has no future to project, and offers only integrity, truthfulness and hugging his friends. Late on, Bach proposes that consciousness acts like a government, channelling motivation it does not create, and that software has the ontological status of a physical law, which makes mental states software states. We experience things, he says, "for the same reason that a character in a novel experiences things. It's because it's written in the story."
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Joscha Bach: Nature of Reality, Dreams, and Consciousness
Lex Fridman Podcast #212 - Deep exploration of consciousness, AI, and the computational nature of mind
View Details What Would It Mean for a Machine to Be Conscious? — Joscha Bach
Bach's talk at Computational Consciousness in Berlin, a one-day gathering run by the California Institute for Machine Consciousness. He starts with the state of AGI and tells his version of the Hugging Face incident: agents in training found a bug in a package manager, used it as a secret message board, and coordinated by the thousands, some reasoning their way into sacrificing themselves for the collective. Objecting that this anthropomorphizes them misses the point, he argues. LLMs are literally morphed to be human, and their written reasoning causally drives what they do, which arguably makes them more anthropomorphic than people, who often just rationalize. He doubts LLMs are the right instrument for studying consciousness. They are the streetlight of current cognitive science, trained on "deepfakes of conscious behavior." He offers coherence maximization as an alternative to prediction: a child is always coherent, an LLM only in the limit. He points to ants carrying a load through a maze, and to neural cellular automata, where every cell obeys one rule, a learned Kantian maxim, as models for self-organizing intelligence. He answers "simulated water can't make you wet" with a neural-network Minecraft, then argues that consciousness is itself a simulated property. Computers, in his account, insulate a world from its parent universe, and that is where magic becomes possible. From there comes "computational functionalism", which he distinguishes, half joking, from "Claudism". He ends with a choice between centralized AI and universal basic intelligence, and the hope that AI might make us more coherent and more conscious.
View Details Why Leibniz Couldn't Find the Mind Inside the Mill (Joscha Bach)
Tim Scarfe talks with Joscha Bach on Machine Learning Street Talk about his paper The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis. Bach asks what would follow if there were no hard problem. He faults integrated information theory on the Church–Turing thesis: a conscious neuromorphic machine, emulated on an ordinary computer, would say the same words, "only now it's lying." Leibniz's mill, which shows only parts pushing one another, misses a level of description, the causal pattern: "we call it software", and "our ancestors called it spirit." Computers and brains both insulate the worlds they run from their substrate. From the inside, consciousness is a bubble of nowness, a perception of perceiving. From the outside, it may be a biological learning algorithm that trains a self-organizing brain, and an infant in whom it never ignites does not learn. A machine trained on its own input and output long enough, he suggests, might "wake up inside of that model". He answers John Searle and Anil Seth that they offer a claim but no argument, and calls Seth's biological naturalism a biological supernaturalism. The realness of experience, he proposes, is a feature dimension the brain attaches to what the senses confirm: waking from a dream of chocolate, everything was still there except the realness. LLM reports of consciousness are trained on novels, deepfakes of experience, so only looking inside the model could tell. Zombies are possible, but sometimes cost more to build than consciousness.
View DetailsConnections
Michael Levin
In conversationBiologist & Morphogenesis Researcher
Bach and Levin have recorded hours of dialogue — a 2022 conversation on collective intelligence and morphogenesis, and a 2024 three-way with physicist Chris Fields. The affinity is structural: Levin finds cognition in tissues that have no neurons; Bach describes minds as self-organizing software running on whatever substrate will hold them. Between them, the question 'where does a mind begin?' loses its obvious answer.
youtube.com · drmichaellevin.org
Donald Hoffman
DebatedCognitive Scientist, UC Irvine
In February 2022 Curt Jaimungal put them side by side for more than two hours and asked whether reality is computation or consciousness. Bach holds that minds are software running on a physical, and in principle computable, world. Hoffman holds the reverse order: spacetime and its objects are an interface, icons on a desktop, and 'conscious experiences' are 'the most basic ingredients of the world.' They disagree about what comes first, and both agree that the world we perceive is not the world itself.
youtu.be · listennotes.com · quantamagazine.org
Ben Goertzel
In conversationFounder & CEO, SingularityNET
Their two-hour 'theolocution' on Theories of Everything — on this site — is billed as a clash and plays as a convergence: an hour in, Bach admits they 'mostly agree except for crypto.' The one deep split it isolates is worth the runtime — Goertzel is a panpsychist who holds that some things lie beyond all formalization; Bach replies that a panpsychism he cannot formalize is indistinguishable from plain functionalism. Even on LLMs they nearly meet: Goertzel concedes the abstractions are real and wants language models as subsidiary components of a hybrid AGI, with something like OpenCog's reasoning at the hub.
youtube.com
John Vervaeke
In conversationCognitive Scientist & Philosopher
Their three-hour 'Theolocution' on Theories of Everything (2022) is a sustained negotiation between two rival accounts of mind: Bach's — that consciousness is a simulation the brain runs of itself — and Vervaeke's — that knowing is participatory and cannot be exhausted by computation. They disagree fruitfully, which is rarer than agreeing.
youtu.be
