are we living in base reality?
I think we cannot know whether we are in base reality because in principle everything that you remember to have been the case could be fake.
Key Insights
Existence is defined by implementation.
"To exist means to be implemented."
Systemic thinking is crucial for addressing complex global issues.
"Our academic institutions have lost the ability to instill the ability to think systemically."
Human cognition is deeply intertwined with real-time interaction with the environment.
"We learn because we are coupled to the world in real time and we can discover ourselves in the world in this coupling."
AI learning methods differ fundamentally from human cognition.
"The other thing that we observe is that these methods that we're currently using for the training transformers and related classes of algorithms are very unlike human brains."
Human learning is inherently experiential and context-driven.
"A human baby if you lock it into a dark room after birth and you give it 800 million pictures with captions is not going to learn the structure of the world."
Biological and social systems evolve through self-organization rather than direct design.
"You don't build the system that you want to have, but you build the system that wants to become what you want to have."
Human understanding is limited and often superficial.
"Humans really are very very bad at understanding things. Humans interact with reality without understanding how they interact with it."
AI might be essential for achieving true understanding.
"AI is our only chance to build a system that is able to understand something."
The uncertainty of base reality challenges our perception of existence.
"I think we cannot know whether we are in base reality because in principle everything that you remember to have been the case could be fake."
The concept of base reality remains elusive and unverifiable.
"Base reality is that which is not created by something else."
The Synthesis
AI's Consciousness Revolution: Bach's Electric Warning
Artificial General Intelligence isn't decades away—it's the moment when machines surpass humans at creating better AI, after which we can simply "leave the rest to the machine," warns cognitive scientist Joscha Bach in this riveting exploration of humanity's technological endgame. Our civilization stands at a precipice: unable to plan beyond 2050, facing climate collapse and resource exhaustion, with institutions utterly failing to address existential threats despite having the necessary knowledge.
Bach demolishes comforting illusions about current AI systems, arguing they fundamentally differ from human cognition while simultaneously outperforming average humans in text and image creation. The computational perspective he champions isn't merely technical but philosophical—"to exist means to be implemented," making the universe itself computational. Unlike the internet's unfulfilled promise of democratic connection, AI represents our final chance to understand complex, interlocking systems before ecological collapse, precisely because we've lost the ability to think systemically rather than realistically.
"The baseline is that we are confronted with global warming and impending resource exhaustion and we don't have any solution for this... per default, we're already dead," Bach states with chilling clarity. His most provocative assertion cuts to the existential core: the only way humans can coexist with truly advanced AI is "if it loves us"—suggesting our survival may ultimately depend on teaching machines the one thing we ourselves struggle to master.