Picture this: you’re five years old, lying in bed, unable to sleep. You suddenly wonder if the whole world is just a story you’re telling yourself—maybe your parents, your toys, the very room you're in are all inventions of your mind. This creeps you out, so you quickly distract yourself with a bedtime story. Turns out, this kind of existential wobble isn’t reserved for kids. It’s a question cognitive scientists like Yosha Bach ask but with equations, not teddy bears. In this blog outline, we’ll follow Bach’s journey, poking at the edges of what’s real—both for humans and machines—and see how your next coffee decision might just be a remix of quantum weirdness and clever rewiring.
Which World Are You In? Reality Games, Simulation Theory, and Bizarre Ambience
Have you ever wondered if the world you experience is just a story your brain is telling itself? Yosha Bach’s exploration of simulation theory and physicalism invites you to question whether you’re living in a mechanical universe, a dream, or something even stranger. The line between perception and reality construction isn’t as clear as it seems—sometimes, your mind is the game engine, and sometimes, reality is running on its own, whether you’re watching or not.
Let’s break down these philosophical perspectives on reality:
- Physicalism: This view says the world is mechanical and keeps going, even when you’re not looking. As Bach puts it, “There is something that seems to be completely independent from the way in which our mind works.” The physical world is like a loom weaving the fabric of your mind. You supervene on this machinery, but you don’t control it.
- Simulation Theory: This isn’t just a Hollywood plot. It’s a serious idea in philosophy, religion, and consciousness and AI discussions. Bach notes, “In some sense, you could say that the naive interpretation of Christian mythology is a simulation theory—that God is a coder who has created this world.” Here, reality is a multiplayer adventure, and your soul is the player, fully immersed in the game world.
- Dream Analogy: Bach points out that both waking and dreaming states are “just as representational.” Your mind constructs both, using the same machinery. “This dream needs to be created by something, right? That’s pretty complicated. There are regularities in it. It’s compositional.”
These frameworks overlap in surprising ways. For example, Christian mythology can be seen as an early form of simulation theory, with God as the ultimate game designer. In this view, miracles are like cheat codes or patches to the game world, but you—the player—don’t have admin rights. You experience the world as a story, not just a set of physical laws.
But there’s more: Bach suggests that we live in a world of collective agents—minds, souls, and even cultures—that act across individuals. This “bizarre ambience” means your mind might not be entirely inside your head. Instead, it’s part of a larger narrative, woven from both physical machinery and shared stories.
- Wild card thought: If God is a game designer and you’re running on a beta version, would you request a patch?
- Whether it’s Christianity, panpsychism, or simulation theory, these ideas shape how you process reality—psychologically and philosophically.
This dream needs to be created by something, right? That’s pretty complicated. There are regularities in it. It’s compositional. That means it’s made of parts that can change individually... This means there needs to be some kind of machinery outside of me that is producing me that outside of my mind that is making my mind possible. Some loom that weaves me and that loom is the physical world.
So, next time you have a weird dream or question what’s real, remember: your world might be a story, a simulation, or a mechanical process—and maybe all three at once.
Do You Actually Decide Anything? Free Will, Determinism, and The Kindergarten Teacher Problem
When you think about free will, it feels obvious: you make choices, you decide what to do next. But the free will and consciousness debate is far from simple. Neuroscience and quantum mechanics both challenge the idea that you’re the ultimate author of your actions—just not in the ways you might expect.
Classical Determinism Is Out—Quantum Weirdness Is (Sort of) In
For a long time, many believed the universe was strictly deterministic: everything, including your decisions, was set in stone by the laws of physics. But as Yosha Bach points out, quantum mechanics and the idea of branching timelines (think Everett or David Deutsch’s multiverse) have changed that story. The universe may not run on a single, unbreakable track. Instead, it constantly branches into many possible futures. From the outside, this system can look deterministic, but from within, you can never predict which branch you’ll end up on. The randomness at the quantum level doesn’t create miracles in your daily life, but it does mean the universe isn’t as rigid as classical physics once suggested.
Neuroscience and Decision-Making: The Benjamin Libet Experiment
Neuroscience adds another twist. The famous Benjamin Libet experiment showed that your brain starts preparing for a decision before you become consciously aware of it. In other words, part of your mind is already at work before “you” know what’s happening. Later, your conscious experience gets patched together to make it feel like you made a free, deliberate choice. This finding complicates the idea of conscious agency and is central to the neuroscience and decision-making debate.
The Kindergarten Teacher Problem: Are You Really Free?
Here’s where things get personal. Imagine a child in a classroom. From the child’s perspective, every choice feels fresh and free. But a seasoned kindergarten teacher can often predict what the child will do before the child even knows it. As Bach puts it:
From the perspective of the kid, the decision is free. But from the perspective of the kindergarten teacher who knows exactly what this kid is up to before this kid knows it him or herself, this is going to be not a free decision.
The same goes for a stage magician who can predict an audience member’s “free” choices. From your own view, you’re making decisions for the first time. From an expert’s view, you might just be following a script you don’t see.
Free Will as a Psychological Story
So, what is free will? Bach suggests it’s not a physical property, but a psychological one. Free will is also a representation. It's a representation inside of our mind that tells us that we make this decision for the first time. Your sense of agency is a story your mind tells itself—a model of reality that feels real from the inside, even if it’s predictable from the outside.
Consciousness and AI: The Loop Within
Just as AI systems can model and predict, your mind builds a model of itself, creating the feeling of choice. If you could step outside your own mind, would your decisions still look free? Or would they look like the predictable output of a complex, self-correcting loop?
Brains, Machines, and the Illusion of the Present: Building Minds and Meaning in Cognitive Architectures
When you experience the world, you’re not getting a live feed. Instead, your mind acts like a game engine, generating a model of reality from scattered, delayed sensory inputs and memories. This is a central insight from Joscha Bach’s work on cognitive architectures and the Principles of Synthetic Intelligence. Your conscious experience is a collage—bits of sensation and memory stitched together at different speeds, then edited into a seamless narrative. As Bach describes it:
So for instance a cup of coffee—there is the tactile sense of the cup being warm. There's the smell. There's the view that you have of the coffee cup and all these things arrive at your brain at different points in time. But somehow your brain suggests that it's all happening at the same time. You're smelling it, you're feeling it, you're seeing it.
Consciousness Loops: The Engine Behind Awareness
Consciousness, according to Bach, is only present when a certain loop is closed. This loop integrates your observations, memories, and predictions, creating the feeling of being “awake”—whether in the real world or in dreams. When the loop is interrupted (like in deep sleep or anesthesia), the observer—the “you” that experiences—ceases to exist. This looping process is not unique to humans. Modern artificial intelligence models and cognitive architectures are built on similar principles, where perception, memory, and self-awareness are engineering challenges for both brains and machines.
AI and the Patchwork of Perception
If your coffee break is a patchwork of data, so is a neural net’s language generation. AI systems, especially those inspired by Bach’s micro sai cognitive architecture, process inputs asynchronously and must integrate them into a coherent output. Just as your brain “fudges” the story you remember—retroactively editing like a movie director hiding plot holes—AI models must reconcile gaps and delays in their own data streams. This means both biological and artificial minds are constantly weaving together incomplete information to create the illusion of a smooth, present experience.
Memory, Intuition, and Subconscious Processing
Much of what you perceive and decide happens below the surface, in subconscious or intuitive processes. Both human and machine intelligence rely on these hidden layers. For humans, intuition is the result of countless micro-loops of perception and memory integration. For AI, it’s the result of hidden layers in neural networks, which process and predict outcomes without explicit reasoning. In both cases, the “present moment” is a construction—an output of complex, layered processing.
The Blurring Line: Where Does the Mind End?
The boundaries between biological and artificial minds are getting blurrier. If your phone or computer is constantly feeding into your cognitive loop—reminding you, suggesting, predicting—where does your mind stop and the machine begin? AI’s approach to models, consciousness, and decision-making is increasingly drawn from the same principles that govern your own mind. As cognitive architectures evolve, the distinction between your story loop and the machine’s gets harder to define.
FAQ: The Strangest Questions About Minds, AI, and the ‘Reality Engine’
If you’ve ever wondered whether your cat is conscious, if you could build a mind on your laptop, or how you’d even know if you woke up as an AI, you’re not alone. Yosha Bach’s research into consciousness and AI invites you to ask these questions—and to accept that the answers are often stranger than you expect. Let’s explore some of the quirkiest questions that emerge from Bach’s work on the emergence of intelligence models and the boundaries between minds, machines, and the “reality engine” that runs beneath it all.
Is my cat conscious, or is it just running a simpler game engine?
According to Bach, consciousness is not a simple on-off switch. Instead, it’s about the richness of internal models and the presence of reflective loops. If your cat dreams, navigates its world, and shows signs of self-awareness, it’s running a kind of “game engine” in its brain—maybe not as complex as yours, but not fundamentally different either. The emergence of intelligence models in animals shows that consciousness exists on a spectrum. So, if your cat chases dream-mice in its sleep, it might be halfway to the kind of consciousness you experience.
Can I build my own mind in a lab (or on my laptop)?
Bach’s work on artificial intelligence models like micro sai shows that we can simulate many aspects of cognition, but building a mind as rich and self-aware as a human’s is still out of reach for most of us. Unless your laptop is MIT-certified and comes with a philosopher upgrade, you’re unlikely to create a fully conscious mind at home. However, the boundaries between conscious organisms and AI are getting fuzzier. As research advances, the gap between biological and artificial minds continues to shrink, and the possibility of building complex, self-reflective systems becomes less science fiction and more a question of engineering and philosophy.
If I wake up tomorrow as an AI, how will I know?
This is where Bach’s metaphors about the “reality engine” become especially relevant. The truth is, you wouldn’t know. Your experience of reality—whether biological or artificial—is always mediated by the models your mind constructs. If you woke up as an AI, your sense of self and world would still be generated by internal loops, just as it is now. As Bach puts it, “the game engine generated in my own brain” is what produces your reality. Whether you’re running on neurons or silicon, the subjective experience feels real because it is real to you.
Ultimately, Bach’s research opens up new ways of asking age-old questions about mind, identity, and meaning. Consciousness and AI are not separate worlds; they are points on a continuum shaped by feedback loops, world models, and the stories we tell ourselves. As you reflect on these strange questions, remember: the line between dreamer and dream, code and coder, is thinner than you think. See you in the next simulation.
TL;DR: Yosha Bach’s perspective on mind, consciousness, and AI blurs the line between literal dreams and virtual realities, suggesting that our sense of agency, reality, and even what it means to be ‘awake’ may be more simulated than we think. You might be living in a dream built by your brain—or your favorite neural network.
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