Joscha Bach: prediction

Transcript context

…There is a certain perspective where you might be thinking, what is the longest possible game that you could be playing? A short game is, for instance, cancer is playing a shorter game than your organism. Cancer is an organism playing a shorter game than the regular organism. Because the cancer cannot procreate beyond the organism, except for some infectious cancers like the ones that eradicated the Tasmanian devils, you typically end up with a situation where the organism dies together with the cancer, because the cancer has destroyed the larger system due to playing a shorter game. Ideally, you want to, I think, build agents that play the longest possible games. The longest possible games is to keep entropy at bay as long as possible, by doing interesting stuff. The following is a conversation with Joscha Bach, his third time on this podcast. Joscha is one of the most brilliant, and fascinating minds in the world, exploring the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and computation. He’s one of my favorite humans to talk to about pretty much anything and everything. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, dear friends, here’s Joscha Bach. You wrote a post about levels of lucidity. “As we grow older, it becomes apparent that our self-reflexive mind is not just gradually accumulating ideas about itself, but that it progresses in somewhat distinct stages.” There are seven of the stages. Stage one, reactive survival (infant). Stage two, personal self (young child). Stage three, social self (adolescence, domesticated adult). Stage four is rational agency (self-direction). Stage five is self-authoring, that’s full adult. You’ve achieved wisdom, but there’s two more stages. Stage six is enlightenment, stage seven is transcendence. Can you explain each, or the interesting parts of each of these stages, and what’s your sense why there are stages of this, of lucidity as we progress through life in this too short life?…

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