#053 - Joscha Bach on Modeling Reality & Self-Organizing Software
Audience of One
Exploring Meta Motivation, Complexity, and Sentience
The meta motivation behind patterns of existence involves more than just survival and reproduction. It encompasses the minimization of free energy and the exploitation of entropy gradients to build complexity and control future states. As an agent develops the ability to model and control future and past states, it becomes sentient. The question arises about the ubiquity of sentience in the universe, whether it occurs at the level of individual organisms, brains, or even across entire societies and ecosystems. The potential for society or ecosystems to exhibit sentience remains an empirical question, with the possibility that interactions among organisms or plants over long time spans could result in the formation of representations about their world.
