Consciousness Is Literally Software, Not Metaphorically, Claims AI Scientist

"It's not an analogy, it's literally correct," states Joscha Bach, comparative scientist at Liquid AI, presenting his radical reframing of consciousness as disembodied causal pattern that operates precisely like software runs on computational hardware. "If you think what software is, if you are interacting with computers, it is a disembodied causal pattern. It's very much a spirit."

Bach's assertion that consciousness functions as actual—not metaphorical—software challenges conventional philosophical distinctions between mind and computation, writes End of Miles.

Software that must convince its hardware

Unlike typical computer programs that force deterministic hardware to execute instructions, Bach argues consciousness represents self-organizing software that must perpetually recruit its own neural substrate. "The brain is hardware, consciousness is software," Bach states, but emphasizes a critical distinction from conventional computing: "The software that we build is not self-organizing. It's constructed by humans, and it works because we force the hardware to enact it."

"We make it so deterministic that the hardware has no choice, but your cells at some level have a choice in the same way as a group of people has a choice to run a religion or not. You need to convince all the individuals to believe in the shared spirit. In the same way, you need to convince your cells to believe in you." Joscha Bach

Beyond physical implementation

The cognitive scientist dismisses objections that software remains fundamentally physical while consciousness appears non-physical. He employs money as a parallel causal pattern that transcends its physical implementation yet orchestrates real-world effects. "Money is clearly not physical, and money on the other hand is real. It's implemented in the world. There are large parts of the world that make no sense if you do not assume the existence of money."

This pattern-based ontology applies equally to consciousness, which operates with notable substrate independence. "Your mind doesn't care if an individual neuron dies," Bach observes. "It can recruit a new neuron and train it to do the same function."

From neurons to experience

Bach frames consciousness as an emergent protocol layer that generates what he describes as a "game engine" simulating our experiential universe. "Inside of that mind, which is like a protocol layer, generate a game engine that is giving you a simulation of a physical universe in which you have sounds, colors, people's emotions, the interactions, a model of yourself."

"At some point this conscious perspective is relocating into this nexus of the personal self, and you think of yourself as a human being. You use 'I' to refer to yourself, and this conscious creator of your mental contents that is dreaming you thinks that it's no longer the dreamer but it's a person inside of that dream—and this is our normal everyday experience." The Liquid AI researcher

The AI researcher's computational framework positions consciousness not as mysterious emergence but as algorithmic inevitability—asserting that any sufficiently complex self-organizing system must develop this software pattern to function cohesively. By recategorizing consciousness from mysterious phenomenon to executable process, Bach's theory suggests consciousness could eventually be formally implemented in non-biological substrates through precise mathematical specification of its causal patterns.