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.”