A field guide
Joschese
A gateway to the ideas of Joscha Bach — and to his way of thinking — through a dialect we call Joschese.
What is Joschese?
Joschese is a synthetic language abstracted from Joscha Bach's public thinking — primarily his X threads, talks, and podcasts. It makes it easier to think and communicate about consciousness, computation, agency, and what minds might be.
We've created the Joschese-English dictionary based on the idea that having a word or phrase that points to an idea — rather than a paragraph that gropes toward it — is a valuable cognitive affordance. A name lets you hold a complex idea as a single object: pick it up, combine it with others, reason with it, hand it to someone else.
Each term in the lexicon — cyber-animism, computational functionalism, controlled hallucination, lebenswelt — points toward a particular idea, with links to the posts and talks that gave rise to it. The more of the language you understand, the easier it is to see the single pattern behind all of it.
That is why this is a gateway and not a glossary: the dictionary gets you to the doorway, and the corpus is the room.
Who is Joscha Bach?
Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist and AI researcher whose work asks a disquieting question: what if consciousness is not a mystery substance but a simulation the brain runs — a story it tells itself about being someone?
His thinking spans computational functionalism, cyber-animism, the nature of meaning in language models, AI alignment, and a rationalist reinterpretation of spirituality. Much of it lives on X (@Plinz), where he develops ideas in long threads rather than formal papers.
This site organizes that vocabulary, makes the corpus searchable, and offers a way to converse with the ideas through an AI guide grounded in his public output — not impersonating him.
What's in the archive
Dictionary
All 60 terms →agency
newThe ability to take control of the future by coherently participating in higher layers of organization, from individual to civilization-scal…
alignment
newHuman alignment is prerequisite or parallel to AI alignment; the latter may be best delegated to smarter-than-human systems. Involves aligni…
animism
newAnimism understands organisms and complexity as expressions of self-organizing software agents that control and structure physical systems. …
autocatalytic consciousness
newConsciousness is autocatalytic: it feeds on the substrate conditions it creates. LLMs are not autocatalytic, their behavior only depends on …
automaton
newA causally closed lowest layer or substrate generating all observable patterns via simple compositional rules; mathematics is its library an…
causal insulation
newThe principle that makes computation relevant to minds and life: computers create self-contained worlds governed by rules independent from s…