[Y]ou don't know this state in which you don't have a self. You can turn off yourself... You can... meditate yourself [into] a state where you are st… - Joscha Bach

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[Y]ou don't know this state in which you don't have a self. You can turn off yourself... You can... meditate yourself [into] a state where you are still conscious, where still things are happening, where you know everything that you knew before, but you're no longer identified with changing anything. ...[T]his means that your self ...dissolves. There is no longer this person... you know that this person construct exists in other states and it runs on this brain... but it's not a real thing. It's a construct. It's an idea... and you can change that idea, and if you let go of this idea... If you don't think you are special, you realize it's just one of many people, and it's not your favorite person even... It's just one of many, and it's the one that you are doomed to control... and that is... informing the actions of this organism as a control model. This is all there is, and you are somehow afraid that this control model gets interrupted, or loses the identity of continuity.

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About Joscha Bach

, also known as “the wizard of consciousness”(born 1973 in Weimar, Germany) is a cognitive scientist focusing on cognitive architectures, models of mental representation, emotion, motivation and sociality. Achievements include research in novel data compression algorithm using concurrent entropy models; development of microPsi cognitive architecture for modeling emotion, motivation, mental representation. In 2000, Bach graduated with a diploma in Computer Science from Berlin, followed by a Doctor of Philosophy at Osnabrück University, Germany, in 2006. Before joining , he worked as a visiting researcher at the and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Fact finding reports by the and found that Bach’s research was supported with more than $150,000 by the Foundation.

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Additional quotes by Joscha Bach

I don't actually have an identity beyond the identity that I construct. ...[T]he Dalai Lama... identifies as a form of government. [He] gets reborn, not because he is confused, but because he is not identifying as a human being. He runs on a human being. He's... a governmental software that is instantiated in every new generation anew. So his advisors will pick someone who does this in the next generation. So if you identify with this, you are no longer human and you don't die in this sense... only the body that you run on. To kill the Dalai Lama you'd have to kill his tradition.

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In cognitive science, we currently have two major families of architectures... One, the classical school... characterized as Fodorian Architectures, as... the manipulation of a language of thought, usually expressed as a set of rules and capable of . ...The other family favors distributed approaches and constrains a dynamic system with potentially astronomically many until... behaviors [of] general intelligence are left. This may seem more "natural" and well-tuned... Yet many functional aspects of intelligence... as planning and language, are... much harder to depict using the dynamical systems approach.

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