Joscha Bach: Mind Is Software and Software Is a Physical Law

October 26, 2020

EP87 Joscha Bach on Theories of Consciousness

"So typically when I say mind, I refer to essentially the software that runs on the brain, and that enables everything else. And what is software? I think that software is best understood not as a physical thing, as something that has an identity, but as a physical law. It’s a very specific physical law that says, whenever you put things together in the universe in this particular arrangement, the following thing will happen. And the following thing is a description in terms of certain macro states that have a causal structure. And in a sense you could say that for instance that the text processor in your computer doesn’t have an identity. It’s a physical law. And a physical law says that, when the gates in your computer are in this, and this arrangement, they can be described as a text processor. And when you interact with it, the following thing will happen when it’s currently in this, and this state. So the same category of things is mind. It doesn’t have an identity. It’s a principle. It’s a software that runs on your brain. And it doesn’t run on your brain because it is corresponding one to one to a configuration of atoms in your neurons, but because there is a coherence causal structure emerging over the activity of the neurons that you can use to describe it. It’s a lens to look at the activity of many neurons. And there is not a reason why this should not happen in other substrates that are under the same functional constraints, and can implement the same principles. In the same was as we can implement software on many, many different types of computer, as long as brains are Turing complete, you can build minds on different substrates, if you are implementing the same causal principles."

[Pinstripe]

Hard disagree. Joscha's confusion of consciousness with software harkens back to the romantic 19th Century notions of math, and how God was a mathematician.