EP 334 Worldviews: Joscha Bach
From The Jim Rutt Show by The Jim Rutt Show
February 26, 2026 · 1h 3m · Season 1 · Episode 334
About this episode
Jim Rutt interviews cognitive scientist Joscha Bach about the nature of consciousness and reality.
Jim talks with cognitive scientist and AI researcher Joscha Bach about the computational and representational foundations of consciousness, mind, and reality. They discuss the phenomenology of waking up and coalescing into a self, language as a representational architecture and natural language as "a genre of music," the brain as a game engine constructing a simulated world, the "feeling of realness" as a hallucination, "to be real means to be implemented" as a criterion for reality, money as an AI and a mechanism for reward allocation, the need for multi-dimensional organizational signaling beyond money, the apparent reversibility of the universe as an emergent observational artifact, the block universe and its incompatibility with stacked emergence, causality as a model property and retrocausality at the level of agents, computation vs. the simulation hypothesis, the brain's object engine and the perceptual choice to see textures vs. named objects, aphantasia and metacognition about perception, why only simulations can be conscious, Christof Koch's shift from physicalism to panpsychism and the unreliability of revelatory mental states, consciousness as second-order perception…
People in this episode
Host: Jim Rutt
Guest: Joscha Bach
Topics covered
- consciousness
- AI
- cognitive science
- phenomenology
- panpsychism
- simulation hypothesis
Keywords
- consciousness
- mind
- reality
- language
- simulation
- causality
- intelligence
- panpsychism
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Waymo
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