The world that the Christians want is one that is transcending this one. It’s a different organization in which we are much more tightly aligned with each other and basically become a single mind. This is, I think the idea of heaven; is that merging of all the minds into one that basically have shared interests. It’s radical nonduality.

How a Spiritual Worldview Explains Consciousness (2025)

Portrait of Joscha Bach

Joscha Bach

Artificial Intelligence Researcher and Cognitive Scientist
Born: December 21, 1973

Joscha Bach is a German cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher who explores one of humanity’s most profound questions: how minds work and whether machines can truly think. Known for his work on cognitive architectures, artificial intelligence, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, multi-agent systems, and philosophy of mind, Bach bridges the gap between abstract philosophy and practical AI development. He has worked at prestigious institutions including MIT Media Lab and Harvard, where he develops computational models that attempt to recreate human-like thinking in machines.

Bach argues that “consciousness is a simulated property of the simulated self”—suggesting that our sense of being aware might itself be a kind of sophisticated mental software. Through his MicroPsi project, he creates virtual agents that help us understand how intelligence emerges from simple computational processes, making him a leading voice in debates about artificial general intelligence and machine consciousness.

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Robert Lawrence Kuhn

A Landscape of Consciousness

Diverse explanations or theories of consciousness are arrayed on a roughly physicalist-to-nonphysicalist landscape of essences and mechanisms. Categories: Materialism Theories (philosophical, neurobiological, electromagnetic field, computational and informational, homeostatic and affective, embodied and enactive, relational, representational, language, phylogenetic evolution); Non-Reductive Physicalism; Quantum Theories; Integrated Information Theory; Panpsychisms; Monisms; Dualisms; Idealisms; Anomalous and Altered States Theories; Challenge Theories. There are many subcategories, especially for Materialism Theories. Each explanation is self-described by its adherents, critique is minimal and only for clarification, and there is no attempt to adjudicate among theories. The implications of consciousness explanations or theories are assessed with respect to four questions: meaning/purpose/value (if any); AI consciousness; virtual immortality; and survival beyond death. A Landscape of Consciousness, I suggest, offers perspective.

Michael Levin

Consciousness, Biology, Universal Mind, Emergence, Cancer Research

Biology’s deepest truths don’t live at the molecular bottom. Michael Levin argues that intelligence, goals, and selves emerge across scales: cells learn, tissues navigate, and cancer shrinks a collective mind’s horizon. Life is intelligence embodied—defined by the size of what it can care about, remember, and become.