Joscha Bach: The world you experience is a simulation your brain produces, and the self that experiences it may not exist
Joscha Bach on what consciousness actually is in mechanistic terms without retreating to woo, mysticism or hand-waving.
His core claim: the self is a pattern running on the brain, not the substrate itself. What you experience as "the world" is a model your brain generates, not the physical world outside. Phenomenology is a representational regime, not just an information-processing property.
We cover why simulating a connectome won't reproduce behavior (C. elegans, 302 neurons mapped since 1986, no working simulation), what's wrong with Penrose's quantum consciousness theory, why he thinks "you don't die because you were never really alive," and his operational definition of consciousness as self-organized second-order perception that increases global coherence.
90-minute conversation. Linked above.
What's your opinion? Is Joscha right?