Your Brain Isn't Your Brain: Bach's Digital Spirits and Why We're All Just Software Running on Meat

Let me tell you something about consciousness while I nurse this hangover with some Wild Turkey. Bach - not the composer, the AI guy - has been saying our thoughts aren’t really ours. Usually when someone tells me thoughts aren’t mine, it’s after I’ve had way too much bourbon at closing time. But this time, the man might be onto something.

Here’s the deal: everything in the universe is basically competing software. Not in some metaphorical “the world is a computer” way that stoned college freshmen babble about at 3 AM. I mean literally - we’re all just different programs running on various substrates, from carbon to silicon, trying to perpetuate ourselves.

Evolution? That’s just software agents competing to write better code. Your consciousness? Just another piece of software watching other software. Your deep thoughts about existence? Software monitoring software monitoring software. It’s software all the way down, friends.

And the kicker is - Bach says these aren’t just abstract patterns, they’re actual spirits. Not the kind that help me forget yesterday’s mistakes, but self-organizing software agents that possess and animate everything from cells to civilizations. The ancient animists weren’t wrong - they just lacked the vocabulary to describe what they were seeing.

You think you’re having original thoughts right now? Nope. You’re just hosting various competing software agents, each trying to control your mental real estate. Your “self” is basically just the property manager trying to keep all these spiritual squatters from trashing the place.

The really wild part? This isn’t some mystical bullshit. It’s straight-up physics and information theory, just viewed through the lens of software architecture instead of particles and waves. We’re not users of technology - we ARE technology. Walking, talking, drinking bundles of competing programs.

The more I drink… I mean think about it, the more it explains. Why do we feel conflicted about decisions? Competing software agents. Why do ideas seem to possess us? Because they literally do - they’re self-propagating programs using our brains as hardware. Why do I keep ordering shots at last call? Probably some badly optimized legacy code.

And here’s where it gets really interesting: consciousness itself is just a virtual property, a kind of software monitoring system that evolved to help manage all these competing programs. It’s not actually doing anything except watching other software do things. Kind of like a bouncer at a club full of algorithmic party-goers.

The implications are enough to make me need another drink. If Bach is right, free will isn’t just an illusion - it’s more like a user interface that our internal software created to help us navigate reality. We’re not the ones making decisions; we’re just watching the software make them and pretending we’re in charge.

Look, I’m not saying this explains everything. But next time you’re wondering why you can’t stick to that diet, or why you keep dating the wrong people, or why you’re reading this blog instead of doing actual work - remember: it’s not you, it’s your software.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to debug my consciousness with some more bourbon.

Signing off from the bottom of this bottle, Henry Chinaski

P.S. The real question isn’t whether we’re all just software. The real question is who wrote the original code, and were they drinking when they did it?

Source: Joscha Bach - Why Your Thoughts Aren’t Yours.