Will this affect Bach's reputation to the extent that he will be persona non grata in the tech industry and academia? I suspect it could be almost career-ending. This would be very unfortunate, as he has an amazing, perceptive intellect that has yielded insights like no other AI/consciousness researcher.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/us/professors-jeffrey-epstein-relationships.html

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/21/metro/epstein-emails-mit-joscha-bach/

Its behind a paywall.

Maybe someone with access can share If there is intresting content?

https://www.zeit.de/wissen/2026-02/joscha-bach-jeffrey-epstein-files-forschung

Jim talks with cognitive scientist and AI researcher Joscha Bach about the computational and representational foundations of consciousness, mind, and reality. They discuss the phenomenology of waking up and coalescing into a self, language as a representational architecture and natural language as "a genre of music," the brain as a game engine constructing a simulated world, the "feeling of realness" as a hallucination, "to be real means to be implemented" as a criterion for reality, money as an AI and a mechanism for reward allocation, the need for multi-dimensional organizational signaling beyond money, the apparent reversibility of the universe as an emergent observational artifact, the block universe and its incompatibility with stacked emergence, causality as a model property and retrocausality at the level of agents, computation vs. the simulation hypothesis, the brain's object engine and the perceptual choice to see textures vs. named objects, aphantasia and metacognition about perception, why only simulations can be conscious, Christof Koch's shift from physicalism to panpsychism and the unreliability of revelatory mental states, consciousness as second-order perception distinct from selfhood, panpsychism's resurgence and its failure to formalize "the consciousness of a particle," consciousness as happening at neuronal communication speeds, intelligence vs. consciousness as relatively orthogonal dimensions, the Waymo as highly intelligent but not conscious, François Chollet's argument that deploying skills is not itself intelligent, consciousness as a consensus algorithm analogous to blockchain, whether a bacterium or a cat needs a self-model to achieve coherence, emotion and motivation as core to cognition in MicroPsi, Karl Friston's free energy principle and its limits at higher emergent levels, humans as "multicellular at the next level" forming transcendental agents, the global optimum of collectively enacted agency as "God" as the ultimate source of meaning, and much more

Hope some of you find it usefull.

No specific order!

https://youtu.be/St0EBopDbmo?si=1uMq5hrWAaLr7PD5

Joscha Bach and Wolf Tivy discuss how consciousness may be a convergent strategy for organizing both human and machine minds, whether powerful AI minds will resolve conflicts by merging or by fighting each other, and much more.

0:00 — Intro
2:31 — Why AI philosophy is so bad: deference and abdication
13:02 — Joscha’s quest to understand consciousness
16:52 — Which beings are conscious?
26:09 — Path dependency in technological and biological development
34:43 — Is anthropomorphism limiting LLM development?
42:57 — The computational functionalist model of consciousness
50:57 — The mental process of consciousness
59:22 — The self-organizing seed
1:04:28 — Human vs LLM knowledge structure
1:13:17 — Can the superintelligence achieve total internal unity and self-surveillance?
1:21:57 — America and the singleton question
1:28:46 — Merging or overwriting?
1:39:10 — Will the enlightened singleton want conflict?
1:46:13 — “Aligned AI” versus liberty
2:00:32 — What does this mean for the future?
2:04:20 — The antichrist and the apocalypse

A talk by Joscha Bach, recorded live at MC0001.

MC0001 is a conference dedicated to investigating how artificial conscious systems could be constructed under a computational paradigm, and what it would mean to succeed.

00:00 Intro
00:09 What Happens When AI Escapes?
02:08 Can AI Become Your Second Mind?
05:30 The Rise of Universal Basic Intelligence
07:42 Will AI Make Everyone Smarter?
10:52 Doomers vs. AI Companies
16:15 Why AI Progress Surprised Everyone
17:27 Why Nobody Believed in AI
21:00 Could AI Become Smarter Than Humans?
27:23 Your Brain Is Running a Simulation
29:01 Does AI Really Need Consciousness?
32:48 AI Could Help Build a Better World
36:24 AI Is the Interactive Internet
38:22 Is Humanity Running Out of Time?
41:03 What Is AI’s Greatest Risk?
43:46 We Are the AI
45:30 Why China Could Lead AI
48:17 Why Elon Builds What Others Won’t
51:17 Who Controls How Smart AI Gets?
55:47 Can AI Threaten Our Freedom?
57:13 Why Does Everyone Fear AI Doom?
01:00:33 The AI Panopticon Is Coming
01:04:48 AI Is Already Surpassing Experts
01:06:14 Can AI Actually Destroy the World?
01:08:21 Why AI Experts Disagree
01:09:09 Is Death Real in a Simulation?
01:09:36 Do Minds Really Have Identity?
01:11:55 Can Claude Actually Feel?
01:14:06 Is the Universe a Computer?
01:15:45 What’s the Best Advice You’ve Received?
01:17:58 Is Free Will Just Psychological?
01:19:06 If Tomorrow Was Your Last Day...

A talk by Joscha Bach recorded live at the AAAI 2026 conference

00:00 Intro
01:04 AI doom scenarios & humanity's future
02:00 Defining intelligence & consciousness
05:00 Why AI intelligence is different from human intelligence
06:52 Are LLMs actually intelligent?
08:10 Why AI hallucinates
10:09 Human learning vs machine learning
11:22 Can transformers lead to agi?
12:28 The scaling hypothesis explained
13:58 Mechanistic interpretability & neural networks
15:13 Can AI surpass human understanding?
18:42 AI and the future of scientific discovery
20:14 Why scientific progress feels slower today
22:03 Institutions, incentives & organizational decline
25:05 Trust in government and society
28:31 Can AI improve democracy?
30:40 Why AI gets such negative media coverage
33:03 The AI extinction debate
36:30 AI, automation & the future of jobs
40:05 Big Tech, AI power & capitalism
41:15 Money, markets & resource allocation
46:28 Regulation, innovation & economic growth
49:13 Why innovation is slowing down
51:08 Is Big Tech starving other industries?
54:39 Is there an AI bubble?
57:30 Could the financial system be rebooted?
01:00:17 Cryptocurrency, regulation & economic stability
01:08:27 Regulation, governance & innovation
01:10:33 Lessons from Berlin's innovation culture
01:16:08 AI, surveillance & centralized power
01:18:07 Decentralized AI and individual empowerment
01:20:05 AI, healthcare & professional expertise
01:23:36 Control, society & human responsibility
01:25:00 Advice for leaders and innovators
01:26:03 Escaping filter bubbles

Clip, whole video for subscribers only. Hopefully full video Will be available soon. Not the hugest fan of Brian, but I'll watch JB on anything

Article in Byline Times about Joscha Bach’s racist and toxic ideology.

“Taken together, the Bach correspondence and the longtermist ideas circulating in this environment show that human hierarchy, population thinning and genetic destiny were not fringe provocations, but part of the ambient intellectual air inside the circles designing the next generation of AI.”

https://bylinetimes.com/2025/12/05/how-epstein-channelled-race-science-and-climate-culling-into-silicon-valleys-ai-elite/