Joscha Bach

Joscha Bach is a German-born cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher known for his work on cognitive architectures like MicroPsi, computational models of mind, consciousness as simulated self-organization, and "cyber animism"—a framework blending ancient spiritual ideas with modern AI to view intelligence as emergent software across biological, artificial, and natural systems. He holds a PhD from the University of Osnabrück and has held positions at Humboldt University, MIT Media Lab, Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Intel Labs, and the AI Foundation. He now leads research at the California Institute for Machine Consciousness (CIMC) in the San Francisco Bay Area, exploring the intersections of perception, motivation, emotion, and machine minds. He has appeared on podcasts like Lex Fridman's, TEDAI events, and his own Substack. Bach argues that consciousness arises from coherence-seeking algorithms rather than physical substrates alone.