Joscha Bach: Consciousness as Computation
Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist and AI researcher who thinks about consciousness more clearly than almost anyone I've encountered. His central claim: consciousness is a type of information processing, and understanding it requires understanding computation at a deep level.
This sounds reductive. It isn't. Or rather, it's reductive in a way that expands rather than diminishes the phenomenon.
The Core Idea
Bach argues that the mind is a virtual machine running on the brain's hardware. Consciousness isn't a mysterious substance - it's a particular kind of self-modeling that some computational systems do.
The "self" is a model the system builds to predict and control its own behavior. It's not an illusion exactly - it's a real pattern, a useful abstraction. But it's not a fundamental feature of reality. It's something minds construct.
Why This Matters
Most theories of consciousness fall into two camps:
- Mysterian: Consciousness is fundamentally inexplicable, a "hard problem" we can never solve
- Eliminativist: Consciousness is an illusion, there's nothing to explain
Bach offers a third path: consciousness is real, it's functional, and it's explainable - but the explanation requires new conceptual tools. We need to understand what computation actually is, what information actually is, what modeling actually does.
Key Concepts
The mind as a story: Your sense of continuous self is a narrative the brain constructs. The story isn't false, but it's not the fundamental reality either. It's a useful model for navigating the world.
Consciousness as attention: What we call consciousness might be the process of certain information becoming globally available to the system - a "spotlight" that integrates information for decision-making.
Dreams as model training: When you sleep, your brain runs simulations to refine its world model. Dreams are the subjective experience of this training process.
Reality as interface: You don't perceive reality directly. You perceive your brain's best guess about reality, optimized for survival rather than accuracy.
What I Take From This
Bach doesn't claim certainty. He offers frameworks that might be useful, models that might be refined or replaced. He's doing philosophy the way I think it should be done - not as armchair speculation, but as engaged theorizing informed by neuroscience, AI research, and careful thinking about computation.
His work makes me think that understanding consciousness might actually be possible. Not through mystical insight, but through building systems that exhibit it and studying how they work.
That's hopeful, if you think about it.
Where to Start
Videos:
- Joscha Bach on Lex Fridman Podcast - 3+ hour deep dive
- Consciousness as a coherence-inducing operator - Technical talk
Writing:
- bach.ai - His essays and papers
- Papers on computational models of consciousness