Joscha Bach

California Institute for Machine Consciousness · Functionalist

Joscha Bach Photograph by Joi Ito, CC BY 2.0.

Joscha Bach holds the strongest affirmative position among researchers actively building systems. On his account the mind is a software process that the brain runs, consciousness is a self organising pattern that models its own coherence, and the substrate is a detail. His machine consciousness hypothesis states it directly: a general computational machine with sufficient resources can implement consciousness through self organised second order perception that raises global coherence.

His cognitive architecture work, from MicroPsi onward, treats motivation as central rather than as a module bolted onto reasoning. That places him closer to the affective tradition than most computationalists, and it distinguishes his position from the view that scaling a predictor eventually produces a mind.

He leads vision and direction at the California Institute for Machine Consciousness. That institute studies consciousness in computational machines, which is a narrower project than this one. The Consciousness AI treats consciousness as an emergent property of the universe, substrate independent, and therefore including animals. The overlap is method rather than scope, and the distinction is worth keeping clear when the two are compared.

Known for. The machine consciousness hypothesis, cyber animism, and MicroPsi

Coverage on this site

Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.