Joscha Bach: evaluation

Transcript context

…But let me ask the question. Since we talked about Michael Levin and yourself who I think are very kind of radical, big, independent thinkers, can we reverse engineer your process of thinking autonomously? How do you do it? How can humans do it? How can you avoid being influenced by what is it stage three? Well, why would you want to do that? You see what is working for you and if it’s not working for you, you build another structure that works better for you. And so I found myself in, when I was thrown into this world, in a state where my intuitions were not working for me. I was not able to understand how I would be able to survive in this world and build the things that I was interested in, build the kinds of relationship I needed to work on the topics that I wanted to make progress on, and so I had to learn. And for me, Twitter is not some tool of publication. It’s not something where I put stuff that I entirely believe to be true and provable. It’s an interactive notebook in which I explore possibilities. And I found that when I tried to understand how the mind and how consciousness works, I was quite optimistic. I thought it needs to be a big body of knowledge that I can just study and that works, and so I entered studies and philosophy and computer science and later psychology and a bit of neuroscience and so on, and I was disappointed by what I found because I found that the questions of how consciousness and so on works, how emotion works, how it’s possible that the system can experience anything, how motivation emerges in the mind were not being answered by the authorities that I met and the schools that were around. And instead I found that with individual thinkers that had useful ideas that sometimes were good, sometimes were not so good. Sometimes were adopted by a large group of people, sometimes were rejected by large groups of people, but for me it was much more interesting to see these minds as individuals. And in my perspective, thinking is still something that is done not in groups that has to be done by individuals. So that motivated you to become an individual thinker yourself?…

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