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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Joscha Bach: The Self Is a Story Your Brain Tells Itself

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Brian Keating

Physics, Natural Sciences, Science

4.71.1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2026

⏱️ 91 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The AI theorist who thinks consciousness is a software agent — and that God, AGI, and the apocalypse are all pointing at the same thing. What you think is "the world" isn't outside you. It's a simulation your brain produces, and the self that experiences it may not exist in the way you think it does.J oscha Bach is an AI researcher and cognitive scientist whose work sits at the intersection of computation, consciousness, and the architecture of the mind. He's one of the few thinkers willing to explain what experience actually is in mechanistic terms — without retreating to mysticism or handwaving. We cover: -why the world you perceive is a model your brain generates — not the physical world itself -what's actually wrong with Roger Penrose's quantum consciousness theory -why simulating a connectome won't produce behavior -what neuroscience is still missing; whether AGI is possible on current hardware -how religion functions as an operating system for civilizations -why atheists like Sam Harris may be more Protestant than they realize The self is not the substrate. You are not your neurons — you're the pattern running on them. KEY TAKEAWAYS 00:00 You Don't Live in the World — It Lives in You 10:05 Why Scientists Refuse to Explain Reality 14:50 Where Joscha Disagrees with David Deutsch 21:10 What Would a Truly Intelligent Machine Actually Do? 25:00 Why Chess Destroys Good Minds30:40 Can You Upload a Brain? What Neuroscience Gets Wrong 38:45 Why Einstein Needed a Body to Discover Relativity 46:00 AI Companies as Prophets of the New Religion 50:10 You Don't Die Because You Were Never Really Alive 57:50 Religion as a Civilizational Operating System 1:04:00 What the Torah Knew That Sam Harris Doesn't 1:12:00 What Is God, Actually? 1:18:00 What Bach University Would Teach 1:27:50 Confronting Your Own Death ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:01.0

Everything you experience right now, the sound of my voice, the color of your room,

0:05.0

the feeling of being you is not the world.

0:08.0

It's a simulation your brain is running and the man who can prove it has just entered the conversation.

0:13.0

What actually makes a cell, a cell is not the set of molecules, but it's the software that is running on them.

0:19.0

So the actually invariance of life is a particular kind of software agent that is running on them.

0:24.6

We, you and me, we are patterns within this message passing.

0:27.6

So you exist as a simulation of what would be like if you existed.

0:31.6

Sam Harris thinks that the claim of God is a claim about a physical being. God is a psychological phenomenon.

0:39.3

This does not mean that God is unreal. God is not more or less real than you are.

0:44.3

Yoshabank has spent 20 years arguing that consciousness is not a physics problem.

0:48.3

It's a software problem. And by the end of this conversation,

0:51.3

you'll understand why Roger Penrose is wrong.

0:55.0

I believe you said, you are not the world. The world is in you. And I'm just kind of wondering

1:01.7

where that comes from. That sounds a little bit like past guest, Deepak Chopra, but I'm sure

1:07.8

it's not meant in that same way. So I'm holding his microphone right now.

1:11.3

You know, if I drop it, what just happened?

1:14.0

Walk me through, walk my listeners.

1:16.3

What just happened from the brain to reality itself?

1:20.1

What is going on?

1:21.1

Where am I in this process?

1:22.6

First of all, I think in our culture, we typically have this division between the inside, our psychology,

1:30.3

our thoughts, our reflections, our emotions, and the outside world, which we take to be

...

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