Joscha Bach: belief

Transcript context

…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? This model is derived from concept by the psychologist Robert Kegan, and he talks about the development of the self as a process that happens in principle by some kind of reverse engineering of the mind, where you gradually become aware of yourself, and thereby build structure that allows you to interact deeper with the world and yourself. I found myself using this model not so much as a developmental model. I’m not even sure if it’s a very good developmental model, because I saw my children not progressing exactly like that. I also suspect that you don’t go through these stages necessarily in succession, and it’s not that you work through one stage and then you get into the next one. Sometimes, you revisit them. Sometimes, stuff is happening in parallel. But it’s, I think, a useful framework to look at what’s present, and the structure of a person, and how they interact with the world, and how they relate to themselves. It’s more like philosophical framework that allows you to talk about how minds work. At first, when we are born, we don’t have a personal self yet, I think. Instead, we have an attentional self, and this attentional self is initially in the infant tasked, is building a world model, and also an initial model of the self. But mostly, it’s building a game engine in the brain that is tracking sensory data, and uses it to explain it. In some sense, you could compare it to a game engine like Minecraft or so, colors and sounds. People are all not physical objects. They’re creation of our mind at a certain level. Of course, screening models that are mathematical that use geometry, and that use manipulation of objects, and so on to create scenes in which we can find ourselves, and interact with them. Minecraft?…

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