Joscha Bach and Karl Friston: What Happens When the Self Dissolves?

Karl Friston, Joscha Bach, and Curt Jaimungal explore death, AI models of the brain, God, and the nature of consciousness. They debate self‑organization, overlapping realities, and the future of substrate‑agnostic intelligence.

0:00 Introduction
1:47 New paper discussion
9:13 Sentience vs consciousness vs self
21:00 Self‑organization and self‑evidencing
29:02 Overlapping realities as art
41:05 Mortal computation and substrate‑agnostic AI
56:38 Beyond von Neumann architectures
1:00:23 AI surpassing human researchers
1:20:34 Exploring vs exploiting (curiosity risk)
1:27:02 Incompleteness and interdependence
1:32:25 Defining consciousness
1:53:36 Multiple overlapping consciousnesses
2:03:03 Unified experience & schizophrenia insights
2:10:16 Psychedelic experiences
2:22:20 Institutional rot in science
2:23:31 OpenAI CEO controversy
2:32:22 Existential crises in consciousness research
2:35:06 Podcast wrap‑up

SPONSORS:

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RESOURCES:

- Mortal Computation, a Foundation for Biomimetic Intelligence (Karl Friston): https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09589
- A Path to Generative Artificial Selves (Joscha Bach and Liane Gabora): https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/y3tzs
- Podcast w/ Joshua on TOE (solo): https://youtu.be/3MNBxfrmfmI
- Podcast w/ Joscha Bach & Ben Goertzel on TOE: https://youtu.be/xw7omaQ8SgA
- Podcast w/ Joscha Bach & John Vervaeke on TOE: https://youtu.be/rK7ux_JhHM4
- Podcast w/ Joscha Bach & Michael Levin on TOE: https://youtu.be/kgMFnfB5E_A
- Podcast w/ Joscha Bach & Donald Hoffman on TOE: https://youtu.be/bhSlYfVtgww
- Podcast w/ Karl Friston solo on TOE: https://youtu.be/SWtFU1Lit3M
- Podcast w/ Karl Friston & Michael Levin on TOE: https://youtu.be/J6eJ44Jq_pw
- Podcast w/ Karl Friston & Anna Lemke on TOE: COMING
- Podcast w/ Michael Levin on TOE: https://youtu.be/Z0TNfysTazc
- I Am a Strange Loop (Douglas Hofstadter): https://amzn.to/3GGqjpM

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal features long-form, technically detailed interviews with leading researchers in physics, mathematics, consciousness, and philosophy, exploring topics at the level of active research. For academics, graduate students, and anyone seeking depth beyond popular science.

SPONSOR: I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE

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