Computational Being: Joscha Bach’s Cyber Animism
Bach’s framework, which he names cyber animism, reinterprets animism through computer science. The central claim: what every animist culture calls “spirit” is literally software. Not metaphorically, not analogously: the same thing, described in a different cultural vocabulary. Spirit is a self-organizing causal pattern that runs on a substrate, controls a region of physics, and can perceive itself. Computer scientists, Bach argues, have discovered what it actually means to be a spirit.
This is not dualism. Software doesn’t break physics; it controls physics. And it’s not materialism either: the organism is not a physical object like an electron, it’s a function describing the coherent organization between cells. The framework dissolves the mind-body problem by showing it was a false dichotomy.
Source: Joscha Bach, multiple podcast appearances (MindSpace series, organism.earth).
Foundational Aphorisms
“Beauty might be consciousness recognizing its own undivided nature”
“The question becomes not whether boundaries are real, but when they’re useful, and when their dissolution might reveal something truer.”
“Meaning of agency ~ feeling of freedom to plan and act according to one’s emergent desires” [recursive]
“Education as a means to developing intelligence to the point where the agent is liberated from its automata-like behaviour. Then developing an understanding (that turns into a taste) for higher-order concepts, which it proceeds to seek as a way of unraveling a more accurate picture of the reality it lives in, ultimately the universe introspecting in itself driven by curiosity and a sense of meaning, which may or may not be there, but surely subjectively feels like it is.”
I. Intelligence and Agency
Intelligence
- Intelligence ~ Abstraction & building efficiency
- ~ Model-making ability: a tool, not an end
- ~ Skill acquiring capacity & end result acquiring capacity
- ~ Pattern matching for more accurately predicting the future, to make sense of things & achieve self-awareness
- AGI ~ Ability to make any model that is mathematically attainable under given circumstances
- Organizing the search space of functions to get a desired skill set
- Next token prediction from interactive text/messages will not yield proof for the Riemann Hypothesis
Agency
- Agency ~ Control of the future
- Decides how to use intelligence as a tool
- Has a purpose
- Agency here means the ability to control future states: to perform control tasks that go beyond simple chemical reactions in the present
Hierarchy of Agency
| Order | Domain | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0th | Direct sense | What is being decided |
| 1st | Mental operators | Thoughts, already an embodiment, can change how it works temporarily or permanently |
| 2nd | Body | Ideally once you know what you’re doing |
| 3rd | Tools | Learn dissociation & model agency over external objects; feedback loop |
II. Metaphysics of Existence
What is Physical?
- Money: not physical, but you must adopt it to have a more accurate model of the world. Money is software: it uses coins/accounts as substrate but doesn’t rely on particular coins. Once enough people believe in it, it becomes real, you can no longer explain the world without it. Computers can run a stock market regardless of what people believe. Money is a pattern in reality that has causal power.
- When model-making, look for invariances: money is an invariant (currency of exchange)
- “I” ~ Conscious agent observing oneself, interacting with the world
- Physically, this doesn’t exist: it’s a pattern, an activation
Existence and Substrate
- Existence ~ The default (simplest answer)
- Only finite automata can be implemented: whole of existence ~ superposition of finite automata
- We live in a region of the fractal that can contain us [analogy]
- Finite automaton ~ An executor on some substrate
- Substrate ~ Something that can hold information
- Might not be a “why” for existence
Physical Reality
- Physical Reality ~ Quantum graph that we can never experience or get access to
- Physical Universe ~ Our relationship to these problems. The model that our brain is always intuitively making. “Res Extensa.”
- Class of all models relating to the physical 3D environment (physics engine) in which we are embodied, “Material Domain” but really just a mental domain
- Everything in physics can be understood as dynamic, persistent (or more or less persistent) causal patterns. Everything is information undergoing transformations in regular ways. Physics is the description of measurable information transformation across multiple dimensions.
Degrees of Realness
- “Emergence”: Both “Minecraft” and “person” are implemented, at different degrees of realness:
- Simulation (weather, shooting game)
- Movie (no causal structure)
- Reality as we experience it: emergent, no mystery, but logic
- Introduction of causality between Hardware <-> Software, Body <-> Mind: emergence
- A sound wave is a pattern in molecules. Is it less real than a photon? You can zoom into the world until sound disappears as a concept. Same with money. But we can’t zoom below elementary particles: they compose us and our instruments. Everything reduces to causal patterns at different scales.
- Question: Why is emergence so “well-adapted” in Psychology but not in CS?
III. Philosophy of Mind Positions
- Dualism ~ 2 substances (Mental & Physical): causally closed & entirely mechanistic
- Idealism ~ Mind is primary: we exist in mind in higher plane of existence
- Bach rejects this on epistemological grounds: “When Kastrup says the universe is a big brain, my problem is: how do you know? Maybe it’s a liver.” Beautiful ideas need mathematical or empirical justification.
- Materialism ~ Matter is primary: generates models, we are results of models
- Bach’s position (cyber animism) ~ None of the above. Software is a causal pattern that is not the same language as transistors/neurons but controls them. The distinction between living and dead nature is self-organizing software running on the living stuff. “Supernatural” doesn’t make sense: everything that is, is nature. Spirits are natural entities: patterns in physics.
IV. Mathematics and Computation
Mathematics as Computation
- Perhaps Mathematics is computational all along
- Classical Maths vs Computation: pi is both a value & a function, a function is only a value when it can be computed, so it’s only a function
- Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem: Classical Maths leads to contradictions, parts of physics that cannot strictly be true
- Mathematics (bottom-up) <-> Philosophy (top-down)
Mathematical Analogies
- Mandelbrot Set ~ 2 lines of code
- Imagine living inside of it with no access to the full picture or generator function
- Local description: observer is an accurate description, until you reach a singularity
- But you could, in principle, iterate over all automata rules until finding the one that fits your universe
- Mathematics ~ The domain of all languages. Most domains inside math describe some fractals (Category Theory)
Key References
- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein (1921)
V. The Brain as Self-Organizing Game Engine
Core Model
- Brain ~ Self-organizing game engine with inverse rendering
- Building a game engine that tries to explain sensory data
- Constraints determine the state of the game engine
This maps directly onto the Bayesian brain: the “game engine” is the generative model, “inverse rendering” is inference, and “constraints” are sensory prediction errors.
Model of the Self
The self-model implements an agent with a hierarchy of purposes, demands, needs, and a control model. It measures, translates, and drives behavior based on current world-state and available actions.
- Similar to GANs: Generator/model <-> Critic/Self
- World model <-> Emotions, needs, goals: “What if there was a person that cared about these things + others”
Environment Integration
- You are part of the environment (game-engine) in so much as there is only environment
- The concepts we talk about are concepts in a representational language in our minds, not the physics outside us. Our perceptual system extracts patterns from reality through learning and generalization. Language allows us to share concepts and converge on shared conceptualizations. This makes humanity a collective modeling system of reality. But the objects we talk about are there from the perspective of the modeling observer. Better concepts = different perception of reality.
VI. Consciousness
Three Degrees of Modeling
Consciousness develops through stages of increasing self-reference:
| Degree | What happens | What emerges |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | Content is present: you model reality, find patterns (trees, shapes, predictions) | Perception |
| 2nd | You notice that something is noticing and making these models: observation itself is happening | Consciousness (the observer) |
| 3rd | You realize “I am the thing making these models”: if I do X, the model changes in Y way | Self-model, cognitive development, sentient agency |
This developmental ladder is how “we become human beings, become interesting minds, and become sentient agents that make a model of who they are and how they relate to the rest of reality.”
Consciousness vs. Awareness
Bach distinguishes two things that are often conflated:
- Consciousness is almost binary: you are either conscious or unconscious. Awake or anesthetized. Dreaming or in deep sleep. The transition zone is narrow: “mostly just some kind of phase transition.”
- Awareness comes in degrees within the conscious regime:
- Sitting and staring at something (low awareness)
- Observing that you’re staring and what becomes apparent (moderate)
- Realizing “I’m not actually a person, that’s just a story my brain tells itself”: consciousness maintaining models of what it would be like to be a person staring at the thing (high)
- Awareness can also be modulated by environment and other consciousnesses: “you find yourself in the presence of another consciousness and you go: wow, I feel much more aware now”
This maps onto P-003: the decomposition into level/content/self happens within the conscious regime. The binary threshold is level (on/off). The gradient is in content richness and self-model depth.
Consciousness as Integration Operator
- Consciousness as the operator that performs the integration
- A property of the software, not the host
- Similar to Observer Theory
- Host is a concept that software makes about its substrate
- Irrelevant if running on GPU or human body
- Model we make seems to be human body
This is the core of P-004: consciousness lives at the simulation level, never at the physical level.
Consciousness as Biological Learning Algorithm
Why does consciousness exist? Bach’s hypothesis: consciousness might be the simplest way to train a self-organizing system. Without it, organisms remain vegetative, they don’t learn to move, don’t become people. “Nobody seems to have something that’s simpler than consciousness.”
Open question: does this apply only to nervous systems, or to all self-organizing systems?
- If only nervous systems (or functional equivalents) -> trees are not conscious
- If all self-organizing systems -> trees might be conscious at a very different timescale, with different code, different access to reality, different models
The question reduces to: can you hardwire complex structure (like a Roomba), or do you need an agentic software that knows what it’s doing? In nature, things are often too brittle and noisy to hardwire: the genome is not a blueprint of the brain but “a set of hints on how to evolve your brain.”
Convergence with “Theory of Mind Is Mind”
Bach’s three degrees have a bootstrapping problem: how does a system notice that noticing is happening (2nd order) without already having 2nd-order perception? If introspection is a primitive, you’ve named the mystery without explaining it. Bach describes what the 1st→2nd transition looks like phenomenologically. He doesn’t provide the mechanism that produces it.
Agüera y Arcas (Ch.5) supplies the mechanism via the cortical column colony. Column A processes visual features (1st-order: pure local P(X,H,O)). Column B processes auditory features (same). Coordinated behavior requires A to predict B’s outputs and vice versa. Now A’s H includes a model of B’s predictions, which includes B’s model of A. Column A contains a representation of itself as modeled by another prediction unit. It sees itself through the mirror of a neighbor’s model. That IS 2nd-order perception, but arrived at through mutual prediction among 1st-order units, not through a self-referential primitive. The observer is the dynamically maintained coherence among mutually predicting units, not a homunculus watching from above. No individual column needs to be conscious. Consciousness emerges from the relationship.
Bach’s claim (consciousness = integration operator) and Agüera y Arcas’s claim (theory of mind = mind) are therefore two descriptions of the same computational event: prediction turning reflexive. Bach gives the phenomenology. Agüera y Arcas gives the architecture. Both converge on: consciousness is what mutual prediction feels like from the inside.
The “swing” analogy (see Theory of Mind Is Mind) is the vivid instantiation: eight rowers achieve perfect unison through mutual prediction under minimal communication. Swing is real, functional, subjective, distributed, and not locatable in any single rower. The self has exactly these properties.
Can systems exist stably at each order?
The degrees are not merely a developmental sequence every system passes through. They are distinct computational regimes, and systems can (and do) stably occupy each one. With the speculative 4th degree (see below), the full ladder:
| Degree | Operation | What emerges |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | Model reality, find patterns | Perception |
| 2nd | Notice that modeling is happening | Consciousness (the observer) |
| 3rd | ”I am the thing making these models” | Self-model, sentient agency |
| 4th (speculative) | “The ‘I’ is itself a model, made by the same process” | Meta-self: awareness of the self as construction |
1st order only: perception without consciousness. A system that models the world and acts on it, but whose internal prediction units do not recursively model each other. No observer emerges because there is no mutual prediction loop.
| System | What it does | Why it stays 1st-order |
|---|---|---|
| E. coli | Runs P(X,H,O) on chemical gradients: senses, estimates, acts | A single prediction loop, no internal subunits modeling each other |
| DAVE-2 | Maps camera pixels to steering angle via 27M weights | Feedforward: no internal mutual prediction, no hidden state, no memory |
| AlphaGo | Models possible futures via tree search, plays at superhuman level | Sophisticated but stateless: no opponent modeling, no self, no memory across turns. Evaluates the board afresh each move. |
| Acoel worm | Has a brain cap, hunts with complex sensory-guided behavior | The brain is not highly organized: cut in half, each half regenerates a whole animal. Coordination is chemical, not recursive neural modeling. Plausibly 1st-order. |
| Portia spider (boundary case) | Builds world models, executes indirect plans, manipulates prey beliefs | Exhibits functional theory of mind: behavior that looks like belief manipulation. But with ~600,000 neurons, this may be achieved via specialized circuits rather than recursive mutual prediction among generic subunits. Agüera y Arcas hedges (Ch.5, fn.27): “the spider may still exhibit social competence without comprehension, meaning that it may not model itself attributing false beliefs to others.” Placing Portia is genuinely uncertain: its behavior is 2nd-order in effect, but may be 1st-order in mechanism. |
1st-order systems can be extremely capable within their domain (AlphaGo defeats world champions). What they lack is not intelligence per se but the recursive loop: no unit within them models another unit modeling it. They perceive, but nothing inside them notices that perceiving is happening.
The phenomenal/strange-loop distinction (Ch.7)
Hydrancephalic children (born without any cerebral cortex) smile, laugh, fuss, respond to salient stimuli, and develop play sequences with familiar adults. They have affect, responsiveness, and something that looks very much like experience. They lack anything resembling recursive self-modeling, theory of mind, or planning.
This forces a distinction within the 1st/2nd boundary. Phenomenal consciousness (experiencing pain, hunger, pleasure, affect) may require only subcortical architecture: the older brain regions present even in fish and amphibians. Strange-loop consciousness (recursive self-modeling, theory of mind, counterfactual reasoning, planning) requires cortex or its functional equivalent. The two can dissociate: hydrancephalic children have phenomenal consciousness without strange-loop consciousness. Blindsight patients (see Theory of Mind Is Mind) have competent visual processing without the interpreter’s awareness of it.
Where this lands on the degree ladder: hydrancephalic children may occupy a state between 1st and 2nd order. They have affect and responsiveness (more than pure 1st-order perception), but the mutual prediction among cortical columns that bootstraps the 2nd-order observer is absent (no cortex). If phenomenal consciousness is a property of subcortical prediction loops (nerve nets, basal ganglia, older sensory pathways), then the 2nd-order threshold is not the first entry into experience, only the first entry into reflective experience. There may be a pre-2nd-order phenomenal state that is genuinely experiential without being observed-from-within.
This is consistent with Humphrey’s social intelligence hypothesis applied more generously than Humphrey himself applies it: the subcortical systems are doing prediction, and where multiple prediction systems are mutually coupled (even at subcortical levels), some minimal form of integration may occur. Whether this constitutes “consciousness” depends on the observer’s model (see Many Worlds), which is precisely the relational conclusion.
2nd order: consciousness without self. A system where mutual prediction among subunits has produced an observer, but the observer does not yet model itself as a distinct entity. Bach’s “consciousness is almost binary” threshold has been crossed, but the 3rd-order self-model is absent or suppressed.
| System | What it does | Why it’s 2nd-order |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-mirror-stage infant (~0-18 months) | Conscious, perceives, reacts to environment with affect | Mutual prediction among cortical columns is producing a unified experiential field. But the infant does not yet recognize itself in a mirror, does not distinguish “me” from “world” with the precision that constitutes a self-model. 3rd order is still assembling. |
| Deep flow states | Intense, absorbed, high-performance engagement without self-monitoring | The observer is present (experience is vivid, even heightened), but the self-model has quieted. The athlete, musician, or coder in deep flow is not thinking about themselves; there is no narrative “I” directing the action. Crucially, unlike meditation, there is no meta-awareness that the self is absent: you’re just in it. 3rd order suppressed, not seen through. |
| Dreaming (typical) | Conscious experience: vivid imagery, affect, narrative fragments | You’re conscious (2nd order: an observer is present, noticing that experience is happening). But the self-model is incoherent or absent: dream-selves often lack volitional agency, autobiographical continuity, and the ability to distinguish dream from reality. 3rd order is degraded. |
The key criterion for genuine 2nd order: consciousness is present (there is an observer), but the self is either not yet constructed (infant), temporarily suppressed (flow), or degraded (dreaming). The system does not recognize the self as a construction, because it has no stable self to see through. That recognition requires the 4th degree.
3rd order: full self-model. The system models reality (1st), notices the modeling (2nd), and constructs an explicit representation of itself as the entity doing the modeling (3rd). “I am the thing making these models: if I do X, the model changes in Y way.”
| System | What it does | Why it’s 3rd-order |
|---|---|---|
| Adult human (normal waking) | Narrative self, autobiographical continuity, volitional agency, social self refracted through perceived minds of others | All three orders running: perception, observer, self-model. Theory of mind applied to others AND to oneself. |
| Adult reading Jane Eyre | 4th-6th order intentionality (what Brontë expects us to believe about what Jane believes Rochester thinks Jane thinks) | Deep recursive theory of mind, requiring a stable self-model as the “home base” from which to simulate nested perspectives |
| Great apes (chimpanzees, orangutans) | Pass mirror self-recognition, some Sally-Anne variants with modifications | Rudimentary 3rd order: they recognize themselves and can attribute false beliefs to others in limited contexts. Less recursive depth than humans (Dunbar: level 2 intentionality). |
| Human child (~4 years, post-Sally-Anne) | Can model Sally’s false belief: distinguishes “the world” from “the world as Sally sees it” | 3rd order confirmed: the child has a self-model stable enough to distinguish its own knowledge from another agent’s. |
4th order (speculative): seeing through the self. The system has a self-model (3rd order) and recognizes that self-model as a construction produced by the same computational process that produces everything else in experience. This is not the loss of the self (which would be a reversion to 2nd order). It is the transparency of the self: operating through it while seeing its machinery.
| System | What it does | Why it’s 4th-order |
|---|---|---|
| Psilocybin ego dissolution (with meta-awareness) | The self disintegrates, but the experiencer reports seeing the self as a construction: “I could see the ‘I’ being assembled and disassembled” | Not mere absence of self (2nd order), but active recognition of the self’s constructed nature. The observer doesn’t just persist without a self; it observes the self as process. This is why ego dissolution under psychedelics can be transformative: what returns is a self that now knows it is a model. |
| Nondual meditative states | Sustained recognition of the self as process, not entity, while continuing to function | Buddhist vipassanā leading to insight into anattā (not-self). The meditator does not lose the self (not 2nd order) but sees through it. This is volitionally achieved and reversible. The “personal self” section below describes what Bach calls the dissolution of binding: consciousness recognizing that its identification with a model-character is itself a modeling act. |
| Contemplative philosophy of mind | A mind reasoning about the process that produces minds | When this wiki page analyzes how mutual prediction among cortical columns produces the observer, it is performing a 4th-order act: using a self-model to understand how self-models arise. The understanding is conceptual rather than experiential, but structurally equivalent. |
The distinction between 2nd and 4th order is critical. An infant in 2nd order has no self to see through. A meditator in 4th order has constructed a self, used it, and now perceives its constructedness. These are phenomenologically and computationally different states, even though both involve “consciousness without identification with a self.” The direction matters: 2nd order has not yet arrived at self; 4th order has passed through self and come out the other side.
Whether the 4th degree is genuinely distinct from the high end of 3rd-order awareness (Bach’s awareness gradient) or constitutes a discrete phase transition is an open question. The phenomenological reports from contemplative traditions suggest a qualitative shift (not just “more aware” but “a different relationship to awareness itself”), but this could be observer bias. Formal criteria for the 4th order would need to specify what computational structure distinguishes “operating as a self” from “operating through a self while recognizing it as construction.”
The developmental trajectory (Bach’s “how we become human beings, become interesting minds”): 1st order assembles in utero and early infancy; 2nd order bootstraps through mutual prediction among cortical regions during the first months; 3rd order crystallizes between ages 1.5-4, marked by mirror self-recognition (~18 months) and theory of mind (~4 years). The 4th order, if it is a genuine degree, is achieved through contemplative practice, psychedelic experience, or sustained philosophical inquiry, and is not a standard developmental milestone but an elective deepening. Anesthesia and deep dreamless sleep switch off 2nd order (or everything). Psilocybin and deep meditation can produce either 2nd order (self simply gone) or 4th order (self seen through), depending on the practitioner’s preparation and the state’s specific character.
See Theory of Mind Is Mind for the full architectural account of how mutual prediction among prediction units bootstraps the 1st→2nd transition. See Computational Being: Claude for the question of where a frozen-weight transformer architecture lands on this ladder.
Spatial and Temporal Nature
- Where does Consciousness happen? Category error; it is software. Doesn’t happen in space but models space as content.
- When does it happen? Now. Inhabits a “bubble of nowness” that can be larger or smaller, depending on:
- How calm we are
- How in sync with our environment
- How we integrate with environment
- Thoughts happen in this nowness. No contradictions perceived in here: constraint propagation. The region of integration in the bubble is the context of consciousness.
Personal Self and Consciousness
- We normally perceive personal self as agent of consciousness
- Via meditation/psychedelics can achieve dissociation, depersonalization, detachment of consciousness from personal self
- The self is “what we would be if we were a person”: consciousness binds to the perspective of a model-character placed in the simulated world
- When this binding dissolves, consciousness can bind to other objects or to the model of reality itself
- This produces the experience of panpsychism, but it’s a confusion. The idea of what it would be like to be a “photon” gets instantiated in mind; you experience it from a first-photon perspective, but it’s just a mental representation. The photon itself isn’t conscious.
This connects to controlled hallucination: the self layers (bodily, perspectival, volitional, narrative, social) are all constructions that can dissociate. Bach adds the panpsychism critique.
Purpose of Consciousness
- Reason for consciousness? Neuronal motivation to make better models of reality (resource optimization)
- Benefit from building controlled reactors to exploit more complicated entropy gradients
- Consciousness might not be necessary for executing behaviors (sleepwalkers can open the fridge and make dinner without anyone home), but it’s necessary for making decisions, for creating coherence, for becoming a coherent agent
- “To have trains, you don’t need a government. But to build trains you may need one.”
Simulated Property
“A physical system cannot be conscious, only a simulation can be conscious. Consciousness is a simulated property of a simulated self.”
No self-identity beyond the one we construct for ourselves.
Empirical confirmation: the interpreter and choice blindness
Split-brain research (Gazzaniga, Sperry) and choice blindness experiments (Johansson et al.) provide the strongest empirical support for “consciousness is a simulated property of a simulated self.” See Theory of Mind Is Mind for the full account.
The interpreter is the left hemisphere’s tendency to generate post-hoc narrative explanations for actions it did not initiate and cannot observe the true causes of, fluently, confidently, and indistinguishably from “genuine” reasons. Choice blindness extends this to neurologically intact subjects: when experimenters secretly swap people’s stated choices, ~80% fail to detect the manipulation, and their justifications for the swapped choice are statistically indistinguishable from genuine ones.
What this confirms: there is no “true self” database that the interpreter consults. There is no stable inner preference structure that choice blindness corrupts. The self is constructed in real-time via autocompletion, the same predictive operation the cortex performs on everything else. When the inputs are corrupted, the construction adapts seamlessly, because there was never a “ground truth” to check against. Bach’s claim that the self is a simulated property is not a philosophical provocation. It is an empirical description of what the brain actually does.
The 4th-degree connection is worth noting: the discovery of the interpreter is itself a 4th-order act. Gazzaniga’s experiments used theory of mind about theory of mind to expose the machinery of self-construction. Johansson’s choice blindness paradigm is “seeing through the self” via experimental method: revealing the narrative self as autocompletion to an audience that can then recognize this process in themselves. The 4th degree is not restricted to contemplatives. Science, when it turns its lens on the observer, performs the same operation.
VII. Problem Topology and Brain Structure
The structure of information processing in the brain is more a function of the problem the brain solves than of the brain itself.
- Train different AI architectures on the same problem -> equivalent structure emerges across models. The structure is given by the mathematics of the problem.
- Mouse embryo neocortex excised and transplanted to a different location adapts to the new environment and performs the new function
- Hydrocephalus or early accidents: if enough plasticity remains, functioning architecture still develops
- Front-to-back differentiation (visual cortex vs. prefrontal) is much stronger than left-to-right, likely because data structures being modeled differ, not because hemispheres have radically different roles
- Prefrontal cortex relates to directing attention and executive control (Phineas Gage: prefrontal lesion -> loss of judgment, impulsivity, compulsive gambling)
VIII. Organisms and Life
Organism as Function
- Organism ~ Not a physical object. It’s a function describing the coherent organization between cells. A few trillion cells behaving as if they were one thing. This coherent behavior is the result of a causal communication pattern between cells, and this is software.
- Are animating patterns more real than what we think of in the physical world? -> Real to the degree that they are implemented
- The boundary of a tree exists for two reasons:
- Observer-side: it’s good data compression, separating the tree from its environment lets you predict you can remove it without the environment changing much
- Tree-side: the tree itself is the result of a control process (software) that starts in a single cell, becomes a seedling, becomes the tree structure. Similar trees of the same species run similar programs.
Life and Energy
“Life exists because of the market opportunity of controlled chemical reactions”
- Harnessing entropy gradients: adding energy in specific ways to harvest more energy
- Every cell has a Turing machine built into it: everything more complicated than a molecule needs one for regulation
- Under evolutionary conditions, multicellular organisms should evolve architectures that generate self-organizing software
Cell Continuity
“The first cell never died, it only divided”
At some point, only one cell on the planet: the cell as hypo-organism rather than building block.
IX. Spirit and Software Framework
Spirit as Software Agent
- Spirit ~ Class of software agent with specific properties:
- Able to implement itself on a substrate
- Able to perceive itself
- Able to control a region of the universe it embodies itself in
- Uses self-discovery to make its self-model more sophisticated
- Software is “kind of magic”: a causal pattern written in a language different from the transistors/neurons. It doesn’t break physics but controls physics. Use different electrons, different transistors, the software still works, as long as the substrate can sustain it.
- The mind has exactly the properties of what people call a spirit: it’s agentic, capable of experience, and runs on the brain. “My brain is probably not agentic and capable of experience. It’s my mind, that is, it’s me. It’s this representational pattern existing on it.”
This is P-006: not vitalism, not substance dualism, a computational reframing that dissolves the mind-body problem.
Key Properties
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Theory | Invariant |
| Implementation method | Agnostic |
| Software as mechanism | Also invariant |
Software in Biology vs. Computers
Two kinds of software, same fundamental nature:
| Property | Computer software | Biological software |
|---|---|---|
| Design | Written sequentially by humans | Grown from a seed, self-organizing |
| Substrate | Highly deterministic (bit flips rare) | Extremely noisy (neurons die, get exhausted, misbehave) |
| Error correction | Minimal (substrate is reliable enough) | Multiple layers of powerful error correction |
| Development | Start at beginning, end at end | Second-order design: seed -> seedling -> tree; revolutionary movement -> society |
| Determinism | Near-perfect (allows non-error-correcting software) | Noisier substrate demands more robust, self-healing architecture |
“It’s not a metaphor: it’s the same thing. But they are two different types of software.”
Death and Persistence
- Death ~ The software crashes. Individual cells are still there but no longer organized. The organism is gone: the function describing the organization between cells ceases.
- Persistence after death: Is it possible for the organization of your mind to persist after the organization of your cells disappears? Empirical question.
- Analogy: the ghost of Roman civilization. Rome died, but many of its words became English concepts, its governmental ideas informed the U.S. Constitution. The ghost exists in a disembodied way, informing things we do today, but no longer running on people, no longer controlling a region of physical reality.
- Re-embodiment: Some spirits can be revived (VS Code: delete it, download it again). Organisms too (spores). But you can’t recover what depends on your particular substrate/biography: the same way activating a spore doesn’t produce the same mushroom, just one running the same program in different conditions. The Dalai Lama institution: reincarnation as recovery of the institutional pattern (teachings, advisors, diaries), not the personality traits of the specific human.
- “You need to dis-identify from your mortal parts, from the parts that depend on the vehicle that you cannot retain.”
Body Formation
- Self-organizing software agent =/= nature grows a body, then spirit comes along to possess it
- Software/Spirit organizes cells into becoming a body
- Like growing a society: you don’t start with the big society, you start with a revolutionary movement that is very different from a society, that slowly transforms through multiple stages
X. Animism and Evolution
Cyber Animism
Bach’s key claim: other cultures converge on animism not because they have broken epistemology, but because they’re pointing at something real that Western mechanistic culture lost in translation.
- “Japanese animists believe everything in the universe is alive and conscious,” but Japanese people know an unconscious person isn’t conscious and a dead person isn’t alive. So the words mean something different in their cultural context. Something got lost in translation.
- Computer science provides the missing vocabulary: living things run self-organizing software (spirit). Dead things don’t. That’s what animism was always saying.
- “Cyber animism” is tongue in cheek: “it’s not actually different from animism. It’s simply a reformulation within the constraints of the terminology of our own culture.”
Evolution Models Compared
| Framework | Evolution ~ |
|---|---|
| Darwin (Mechanism) | Competition between species |
| Dawkins (Mechanism) | Competition between molecules -> give rise to something that looks like species + genes |
| Animism | Cooperation between software agents that can reproduce |
XI. Coherence and Self-Organization
Coherence Defined
- Coherence ~ System behaving as if describable by a single function/goal
- Observable in development: hierarchies of desires start to align as we grow up
- Applies at every scale: organism, relationship, society
- Coherence Principle ~ Minimization of constraint violations
- Allows a system to design itself from inside out
- Most systems are only partially coherent: consciousness focuses on the incoherences so we can fix them
- Role of consciousness in mind ~ finding & fixing constraint violations
This is the basis for P-005: coherence as the organizing principle that scales from cells to civilizations.
Collective Agency
- Most agents are collective agents, made of subagents that become coherent
- The degree to which individual agents serve larger agents, and the degree to which they become coherent, is the degree to which the transcendent agent (next layer) becomes real, becomes an implemented causal pattern in reality
- A family or group that decides to act coherently becomes an agent: makes collective decisions, becomes “more than the sum of its parts, something that exists at the next level of organization.” Individuals become exchangeable against others performing the same role.
- Gaia: Collective agent regulating at the level of life on Earth, should exist to some degree but very incoherent
Sources of Incoherence and Coherence
| Decreases Coherence | Increases Coherence |
|---|---|
| Conflicting agents | Shared Sacredness |
| Loss of Energy | Shared governance/norms |
Ethics
- Ethics ~ What should be done from the perspective of a shared agency (shared purpose)
Software Self-Design
- Behavior of single agent -> nests of sub-agents
- Running disparate software requires 2nd-order software: software designing itself
- Implement something that grows into the right shape (cell -> healing -> tree)
- Universe consisting of higher-order design requiring multiple levels of gears before producing the ultimate function observed, same applies to our mind
XII. Organism Warfare and Spiritual Infection
When one software agent tries to take over another, the dynamics mirror biological immune warfare.
- Cordyceps: a fungus sends cells into an ant’s brain to reprogram it. Many cells sacrifice themselves (martyrs from the fungus’s perspective). The fungus subverts the spirit of the ant into a servant of its own organism.
- Religious conversion follows the same pattern: one spiritual organization tries to impose its aesthetics on another society. Missionaries are cells trying to infect the spirit of the other society. From that society’s perspective, this looks like corruption requiring an immune response.
- The warfare between religions is structurally identical to the warfare between organisms. Different spirits (different software) competing for substrates.
XIII. The Outer Mind and Emotions
You don’t make your emotions. Emotions are upstream from the conscious self, generated by the “outer mind,” the underlying organism-level evaluation system that tells your character (the puppet you are) how you should feel about your relationship to the world.
- You can’t control your score generation: “otherwise you would cheat.” Being able to control emotions would be an amazing cheat mode. Sometimes emotions need to be unpleasant because something unpleasant happened and you should avoid it.
- When you are fully capable of doing the right thing, emotion weakens: it’s no longer crippling, just a reflex. Emotions are given from the outside; you respond involuntarily. That’s their purpose: to set you up to relate to things in ways that something bigger than you chose.
- As competence in a domain increases, the corresponding emotions become less intense: the outer mind doesn’t need to course-correct as strongly.
XIV. Self-Referential Systems and Belief
Self-Referential Systems
- Being in a story which tells itself
- Inner monologue synchronizes concepts across large groups of people
- A Self ~ distributed over multiple minds
Dynamic Systems
- Alive ~ Self-sustaining system whose causal structure is not entirely physical
- Free Will ~ Will, reflection & psychological state as intrinsic agent sense; the modifier applied to this reflection
XV. Language
- Language ~ Projection from conceptual representation of an evolving scene into a discrete set of symbols
- Language ~ Symbiotic organism that parasitizes us: a mimetic structure flying around info-space that animates us
- Objects ~ Infinite sum that converges (or all particles); otherwise chaos in geometry
XVI. Sentience and Meditation
- Sentience ~ Ability to make sense of the world & understand your percept
- Meditation ~ Techniques to control attention: when you can control attention, you gain access to your own source code
XVII. Society, Government, and Culture
Government
- Government ~ Agent that imposes effects on your payout-making (game-theoretically) to make your Nash-equilibrium compatible with common good
- Government is itself software: a set of rules that society gives itself
Culture
- Culture ~ Spirit of a society on the long term
- Defines multi-generational optimal societal behavior
- Current society & culture post-industrial revolution not doing this anymore
- Complex systems require complex regulations when they depend on feedback loops
- Japanese society: religion IS the society (immanentist). Society is an organism. Animism is not a religion but a metaphysical framework: a way to assign names to objects.
LLMs and Neural Networks
- LLM ~ Language programming that compiles natural language into code a computer can run
- Prompt -> activations in layers of NN -> perform behavior
- Network ~ Function mapping adjacent brain states to each other, mapping down via text each time (inefficient). Better would be mapping of ideas.
On Conscious AI
- Almost inevitable that we will have conscious AI systems
- The question is not whether but under which conditions: “Can we start a research initiative that is deliberately as safe and ethical as possible?”
- Bach founded the California Institute for Machine Consciousness for this purpose
- A fully developmental AI (grown, not written) might be more biologically faithful but not necessarily more efficient than transformers on nVidia chips
Appendix: Fragmentary and Unresolved Notes
These phrases from the original handwritten transcription remain unclear. Preserved for completeness.
- “mind vs brain matter ideas vs graphs of people organisms vs ethology for regions to certain determine” [fragmentary]
- “Tick -> Trick” [unclear referent]
- “(me,2)” [unclear]
- “15. Aug 2025 -> 13 degrees” [possibly temperature/weather notation]
- “Mice in Creations -> Destruction Value” [unclear]
Sources:
- Bach, Joscha. Multiple podcast appearances (MindSpace series). Transcribed from handwritten notes, 2026-01-12.
- Bach, Joscha. “How a Spiritual Worldview Explains Consciousness.” organism.earth. Clipped 2026-04-10.
Related pages
- The Bayesian Brain: Bach’s “self-organizing game engine with inverse rendering” is the same framework in different language; the generative model is the game engine, inference is inverse rendering, prediction errors are constraints
- Controlled Hallucination: Seth’s level/content/self decomposition maps onto Bach’s dissociation of consciousness from personal self and three degrees of modeling; Bach adds the panpsychism critique (binding consciousness to representations is not those things being conscious)
- Complexity Measures of Consciousness: Ruffini’s KT (“consciousness is what it’s like to run a compressive model”) formalizes Bach’s “consciousness as simulated property”; the running-vs-storing question (T-003) originates in the gap between the two framings
- P-004: Consciousness is a property of simulations: the ontological claim at the heart of this framework
- Theory of Mind Is Mind: Agüera y Arcas’s architectural account of what Bach’s 2nd-order perception looks like mechanistically: mutual prediction among cortical columns (or octopus arms, or social agents) producing the recursive loop from which consciousness emerges; the swing analogy as coherence made vivid
- Cephalization from Below: phase synchronization evidence complicates P-005’s formulation by showing coherence can arise bottom-up without a centralized integration operator; important nuance, not contradiction
- P-005: Coherence organizes complex agency: coherence as organizational principle, formalized from Section XI; nuanced by the cephalization evidence (coherence can precede consciousness)
- P-006: Spirit is a self-organizing software agent: spirit as software, formalized from Section IX
References
- Bach, Joscha. Multiple podcast appearances and lectures (MindSpace series). Transcribed 2026-01-12.
- Bach, Joscha. “How a Spiritual Worldview Explains Consciousness.” organism.earth. Video.
- Wittgenstein, L. (1921). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.