Written in the Story

A vehicle, and a model of attention

Bach's definitions come first, and he keeps them plain. Mind is "basically the vehicle in which everything plays out," emerging mostly over the activity of the brain, and inside it runs "a model of the world and the self." 8:54 Sentience is a system discovering itself in its environment, which even a corporation can do without being conscious. Consciousness is the feeling of what it's like, and its job is narrower than it sounds:

"Functionally consciousness is largely a control model of the attention of the system."Bach · 10:21

A self is something else again. "In dreams you will very often notice that you are conscious, but there is no I." 10:59

Vervaeke agrees, then sets the bar for the rest of the conversation. There are two questions: what consciousness does, given how much we do without it, and how anything like it exists in a physical world. Most theories answer one and drop the other. "Any good definition of consciousness should try and answer the function and the nature questions in an integrated fashion." 16:58

What we see is already an interpretation

Bach learned this from robots. Teaching little Sony robots to play soccer, his team thought a lookup table would tell an orange ball from a green field. It failed: where the ball touched the field, the colours were inverted. 19:46 The robot had to work out from context which pixels were ball and which were field.

"A color is not just a certain wavelength or a certain RGB value that you take from your camera sensor. It's an interpretation that is qualitatively bound to the context in which it's being measured."Bach · 21:06

Then faces. A student told him she could see faces in wall sockets. Most people can, he said, and added "the dark secret": "there are also no faces on people. You just project them there." 23:56 What we see in a face, what it feels and how it relates to us, is a high-level interpretation, not a visual feature.

Vervaeke does not dispute the psychology. He disputes the word. If that holds for faces, it holds for everything he finds meaningful: the gauges in his lab, the people arguing with him. "There's an implicit normativity of realness there." 26:53 To call something a projection is to contrast it with something real, and he wants to know what that is.

Physics is the dreamer, not the dream

Bach's answer dissolves Descartes. Sky and ground, light and darkness, plants and animals with their names: none of these are entities in physics. "So the universe that you and me are interacting with experientially and also intersubjectively is not a physical universe." 30:09 Even the split between matter and mind is drawn inside the model:

"Res extensa and res cogitans both exist in the mind. There are just different domains in which we make sense of the world."Bach · 34:37

So we live in a dream, but a dream that has to be dreamt by something, and in a regular way. Lucid dreams show their mechanics: how many things stay stable, for how long. The dreamer, on our best theories, is a brain in physics. And from that follows his most quoted line:

"Physical systems cannot be conscious. Only simulated things can be conscious."Bach · 40:11

The squishy pink things we call brains are elements of our dream. The parent reality is out of reach. "We cannot experience physics." 40:47 Then how can we know any physics? From first principles, Bach says, and from the regularities we find in what the world throws at us. Vervaeke hears Hume coming: "I'm worried about a problem of skepticism here." 43:01 Bach is not worried. He keeps every possibility open, including that there are no other people, and weighs them by the evidence.

Existence comes in degrees

Vervaeke puts his argument in a nutshell: "what's real depends on what's rational," and being rational takes awareness and the intelligence to find some things relevant over others. 1:08:13 So consciousness and intelligence must be at least as real as anything they are used to establish.

Bach answers that to exist is to be implemented, and that most things are implemented only approximately. He reaches for the cup on his desk.

Vervaeke's objection is the one the figure's last row carries. If the cup, the instruments and the physicist are all fictions, how do fictional beings with fictional devices arrive at the physics that is really the case? "It seems to me that you need to say that the objects and the people doing the science are as real as the science itself." 1:16:25

Bach's reply is practical. In a lucid dream, light switches mostly don't work, and you can't read the same text twice. A dream holds its state in working memory, so a world rich enough for light switches needs state stored outside the mind. 1:19:02 His own situation, he says, is indistinguishable from "a robot living inside of some kind of computer," the software discovering regularities and extending its affordances into an environment it can't see directly. 1:23:44

Here they find each other. To Bach, an archetype "is an optimum in a description function," the cleanest model a mind can find, which is what he takes Platonism to mean. 1:26:50 Vervaeke answers that this is "a very deep kind of agreement," because "I consider myself a Neoplatonist," and to Plato the physical is the less real of the two. 1:29:13

What we practise, and what we can offer

The talk turns from what is real to how to live. Vervaeke has been measuring the cost of the confusion: the rates of suffering, "both in the sense of distress and loss of agency, seem to be going up." 1:54:47 He wants this kind of inquiry to become "an attractive way of life," not an intellectual thrill. 1:56:12

"In the end, I don't really care deeply about what you believe. I care about what you practice."Vervaeke · 1:57:54

Curt asks what he would do with a truth that made people feel worse. Vervaeke answers with his classroom. He asks the students in satisfying relationships whether they would want to know if their partner was cheating, even if it ended the relationship, and about 95 percent keep their hands up. 1:59:49 Beyond whatever we desire, "we have a meta desire that what satisfies that desire is real in some fashion." 2:00:13

Bach is bleaker about the civilization and plainer about himself. He doesn't see himself as a spiritual teacher.

"So the only thing that I have to offer in terms of spiritual guidance, is that I hug my friends."Bach · 2:04:22

What he can add is integrity and truthfulness, because "you cannot regulate reality when you're not truthful about it." 2:05:12 Vervaeke's hope is historical: after collapses, people built communities that carried the old inheritance forward, "collecting the candles from what we have made so that we can carry them" to the next civilization. 2:09:44

It steers a drive it did not make

Asked what he has changed his mind about, Bach offers a new role for consciousness. Perception can follow gradients, but constructing an interpretation needs experiments, memory of what worked, and a central plan imposed on everything else. 2:14:21 That looks like a government: an agent that shifts the payoffs of the parts so their equilibrium serves the whole.

"Consciousness is channeling the motivation that we have. It's not creating it."Bach · 2:15:20

It builds a model of where we are, which we experience as reality, and a model of what we should do, which we experience as our purposes. "But the emotive power in these purposes comes from our underlying motivation that is outside of consciousness, that is older than consciousness itself." 2:15:35

"The consciousness as a government. I like that idea," Vervaeke says. 2:16:42 His own change runs in the same direction: he is "seeing more and more good arguments for the interpenetration of fact and value," and of the true, the good and the beautiful, which modern thought had kept apart. 2:17:31

What kind of thing a mind is

A viewer's question about Searle's Chinese Room brings Bach to the idea Vervaeke likes best. Multiple realizability, he says, "is a stand-in for something deeper": causal structure "can be insulated from the substrate." 2:34:25 A stock market could run in another universe. Money would keep working even if we stopped believing in it, as long as banks, ATMs and markets kept responding to it. 2:35:17 So in which sense does software exist?

"And the best answer that I have so far discovered is that software is a physical law."Bach · 2:36:03

A law of physics says: arrange matter this way, and this will happen, anywhere. A program says the same about a functional arrangement, so the programmer is discovering, by building very peculiar circumstances, a very specific physical law. 2:36:09 Vervaeke stops him to be sure: "you're proposing that software has the same kind of ontological status as physical law." "Exactly." 2:36:43

Then the step that matters for us. "Mental states are best understood as software states," so what we are has the identity of a law, not of a lump: a functional identity, not a point-wise one. 2:37:14 Replace a brain's neurons one by one with anything that does what they do, and Searle has to say that at some point consciousness drains out of it. 2:41:25 That makes him an essentialist, Bach says, "and I don't know how to get essentialism to work because nobody has ever seen an essence." 2:41:49

Why the simulation feels anything

The last question comes from a viewer: these models explain intelligence, but why should a simulation experience itself? 2:43:37

Vervaeke answers that you can always ask "but what is it like to have that?", and so you have to stop somewhere. His stopping point: what it is like is largely "this ability to do salience landscaping," the shifting texture of what stands out to you. 2:45:25 That ties experience to intelligence so closely that "when a system is sufficiently intelligent, it's going to be conscious." 2:48:03

Bach starts from free will. "Free will is what decision-making under uncertainty looks like from your own perspective," a view that holds between discovering the first-person perspective and taking it apart again. 2:49:36 Consciousness may be the same kind of thing. Neurons can't know what it is like to be a person, but it is useful for them to model one, so they build a model of agents that care about the future, and one of those agents is us.

"We experience things for the same reason that a character in a novel experiences things. It's because it's written in the story."Bach · 2:51:47

The story is not a line of words but a causal world, rich enough to hold physics, personality and agency. "So our experience of the world is virtual." 2:52:12 The question Vervaeke pressed in the first hour, what in the story is real, is the one it leaves open.