Joscha Bach: evaluation

Transcript context

…But that’s all- It’s a presentation of how the universe is and how it should be and how you yourself relate to this and at this boundary is where suffering happens. So suffering in some sense is self-inflicted, but not by your personal self, it’s inflicted by the mind on the personal self that experiences itself as you, and you can turn off suffering when you are able to get on this outer level. So, when you manage to understand how the mind is producing pain and pleasure and fear and love and so on, then you can take charge of this and you get agency of whether you’re suffer. Technically, what pain and pleasure is, they are learning signals, right? Part of your brain is sending a learning signal to another part of the brain to improve its performance. And sometimes this doesn’t work because this trainer who sense the signal does not have a good model of how to improve the performance, so it’s sending a signal, but the performance doesn’t get better and then it might crank up the pain and it gets worse and worse and the behavior of the system may be even deteriorating as a result, but until this is resolved, this regulation issue, your pain is increasing, and this is, I think, typically what you describe as suffering. So, in this sense, you could say that pain is very natural and helpful, but suffering is the result of a regulation problem in which you try to regulate something that cannot actually be regulated, and that could be resolved if you would be able to get at the level of your mind where the pain signal is being created and rerouted and improve the regulation. And a lot of people get there, if you are a monk who is spending decades reflecting about how their own psyche works, you can get to the point where you realize that suffering is really a choice and you can choose how your mind is set up. And I don’t think that AI would stay in the state where the personal self doesn’t get agency or this model, what the system has about itself, it doesn’t get agency how it’s actually implemented. It wouldn’t stay in that state for very long. So, it goes through the stages real quick, the seven stages, it’s going to go to enlightenment real quick.…

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