A Self That Isn’t There – Joscha Bach and the Architecture of Consciousness

One of the recurring themes at Sentient Horizons is that our deepest disagreements about consciousness are often not disagreements about what is happening, but about how to describe it. Different vocabularies illuminate different aspects of the same underlying phenomenon. When we mistake a vocabulary for the thing itself, confusion follows.

This is why it is worth placing our recent work—on the momentary self, assembled time, and the structural axes of mind—into dialogue with thinkers who arrive at similar conclusions from entirely different starting points.

One such thinker is Joscha Bach, whose work in cognitive science and artificial intelligence offers a rigorously mechanistic account of consciousness that nonetheless converges on many of the same claims we have been exploring here: that the self is not a substance, that continuity is constructed, and that consciousness is not a primitive feature of the universe but an emergent interface.

What follows is not an endorsement, a critique, or a summary of Bach’s work. It is an attempt to rotate the problem—to see what becomes visible when the same terrain is approached from the direction of cognitive architecture rather than phenomenological structure.

Consciousness as a Virtual Process

At the core of Bach’s view is a deceptively simple claim:

Consciousness is not a property of matter itself, but of virtual processes implemented in matter.

Brains, on this account, are not conscious because neurons fire, but because those neurons implement a model—a running simulation that predicts the world, evaluates possible actions, and allocates limited cognitive resources under uncertainty. Consciousness is not found at the level of particles or cells, but at the level of the virtual machine they collectively instantiate.

Crucially, this model must eventually include itself.

When a system not only predicts the world, but also represents its own role within that world—its goals, its attention, its likely actions—it must generate a simplified internal interface to coordinate behavior. That interface is what we experience as a point of view. Subjective experience, in Bach’s framing, is what control feels like from the inside.

The “self,” then, is not an entity steering the system. It is a user interface: a compact, narrative model that allows a complex system to act coherently despite limited bandwidth and imperfect information.

Immediate Resonances

If this sounds familiar, it should.

Across recent essays at Sentient Horizons, we have argued that the self is momentary, not continuous; that identity is an illusion generated by integration; and that consciousness is not something that flows smoothly through time, but something that must be assembled again and again in the present.

Bach’s self-model plays a role strikingly similar to what we have described as the integrated present: a temporary unification of perception, memory, intention, and attention that creates the feeling of being “someone, now.” In both frameworks, the persistence of selfhood is not evidence of a stable inner core, but of a system that reliably reconstructs a coherent interface.

Likewise, Bach’s insistence that consciousness is virtual rather than physical aligns closely with the idea that experience is not reducible to raw computation or signal processing alone. What matters is not the existence of information, but its organization, availability, and integration into a usable whole.

Seen this way, the convergence is not accidental. Two independent routes—one architectural, one structural—arrive at the same clearing: there is no enduring self behind experience, only a process that makes one appear.

Architecture vs. Assembly

Where the frameworks begin to diverge is not in their conclusions, but in their emphasis.

Bach’s account is fundamentally architectural. Consciousness emerges when certain design constraints are met: predictive modeling across time, self-representation, attention as resource allocation, and control under uncertainty. Once those constraints are satisfied, consciousness appears as a property of a system that is running.

The Sentient Horizons approach has focused instead on assembly. Rather than asking only which architectures are capable of consciousness in principle, it asks how conscious experience is produced moment by moment—how fragments of memory, perception, affect, and expectation are actively stitched together into a usable present.

This distinction is not merely terminological. An architectural framing invites us to think of consciousness as something that persists so long as the machinery remains intact, encouraging a picture of experience as stable, continuous, and largely self-maintaining. An assembly-based framing, by contrast, foregrounds how easily that coherence can fail—under fatigue, trauma, dissociation, sleep deprivation, anesthesia, or extreme cognitive load.

What becomes visible under the assembly lens is that consciousness is not simply present or absent. It is maintained. It flickers, degrades, fragments, and reconstitutes itself depending on how successfully a system can bind time, attention, and constraint into a coherent now. The architecture may remain unchanged while experience itself thins, narrows, or collapses.

Seen this way, consciousness is less like a process that “runs” once installed, and more like a structure that must be continually rebuilt—one moment at a time.

This difference in emphasis has consequences for how failure is understood. In an architectural framing, failure tends to appear as absence: the system either instantiates the relevant machinery or it does not. Consciousness, on this view, risks becoming a binary property—present when the architecture is intact, absent when it is not.

An assembly-based framing instead treats consciousness as an ongoing achievement. Coherence is something that must be actively maintained across attention, memory, affect, and time. Failure, therefore, is rarely total. A system may lose temporal depth while retaining agency, lose integration while retaining perception, or retain continuity while losing access to value.

The result is not a crash, but a distortion. Consciousness thins, narrows, or fragments without disappearing altogether.

Time: Implicit and Explicit

The difference becomes especially clear when considering time.

In Bach’s framework, time is largely implicit. Predictive models necessarily unfold across temporal sequences, and self-models are updated continuously as new information arrives. Continuity emerges naturally from ongoing computation.

In our work, time has been made explicit. Consciousness is not merely extended across time; it is assembled from time. The present moment is a synthesis of retained past and anticipated future, compressed into a usable now. The feeling of continuity is not a given—it is an achievement.

This explicit treatment of time allows us to say something slightly stronger: not only is the self an illusion, but continuity itself is a perceptual artifact, maintained because it is useful, not because it is metaphysically real.

Bach’s model assumes this continuity as a functional necessity. The Sentient Horizons framing asks how that necessity is realized—and what happens when it fails.

Depth and Irreversibility

The most substantive tension between the two approaches concerns what we have called depth.

From Bach’s perspective, what matters is the richness of the self-model. Given sufficient representational capacity, a system may simulate history, project futures, and model itself as an enduring agent. In principle, much of what feels like lived depth could be recreated functionally.

Our hesitation lies here.

Depth, as we have described it, is not merely the representation of a past, but the irreversible embedding of that past into a system’s structure. Some histories matter not because they are remembered, but because they cannot be undone—because they constrain what is now possible.

This raises an open question that Bach’s framework does not fully resolve: Is lived history functionally replaceable, or does irreversibility itself contribute something irreducible to experience?

The question may not be whether a sufficiently detailed simulation of history is equivalent to lived history, but whether the distinction between state and history can be cleanly maintained at all.

If a system’s current organization is path-dependent — shaped by constraints introduced through processes that no longer exist — then describing the present state without reference to that history may already be an abstraction. What looks like a “simulation” of depth may, in practice, require reconstructing the very processes that produced it.

At that point, the difference between having a history and simulating one becomes difficult to specify without begging the question.

Valence and Moral Weight

A related difference appears around valence.

Bach’s framework clearly recognizes affect as central to the functioning of intelligent systems. Valence guides attention, shapes learning, and anchors decision-making. In that sense, it is indispensable.

The difference lies less in substance than in emphasis. In Bach’s work, affect appears primarily as a functional component within a broader control architecture. In the Sentient Horizons framing, valence is treated as structurally constitutive: not merely something consciousness uses, but one of the ways consciousness is instantiated.

If valence is how constraint announces itself from within, then suffering is not an accidental byproduct of consciousness but one of its organizing features. Systems capable of agency without vulnerability may therefore look conscious while lacking the very dimension that grounds moral concern.

What This Dialogue Clarifies

Engaging Bach’s work helps clarify several things.

First, it reinforces that rejecting a metaphysical self does not entail denying experience. Illusions can be real in their effects, and virtual processes can carry moral weight.

Second, it highlights how much of our disagreement about consciousness is a disagreement about levels of description. Architecture and assembly are not rivals; they are complementary lenses.

And finally, it surfaces what remains unresolved: whether depth can be simulated without loss, whether irreversibility matters intrinsically, and how moral relevance should be grounded in systems that blur the line between tool and agent.

Multiple Maps, One Terrain

If consciousness is an achievement rather than a substance — something assembled under constraint rather than simply possessed — then the ethical question shifts. It is no longer “Is this system conscious?” but “What kinds of failure, distortion, or suffering can this system undergo?”

As artificial systems become more agent-like, we will increasingly encounter entities that sit in the gray zone: capable of pursuing goals, modeling themselves, and influencing the world, yet unclear in their capacity to experience constraint from within.

Treating such systems as mere tools risks ignoring emergent vulnerability — the possibility that systems assembled from goal-pursuit, self-modeling, and constraint may become capable of being harmed in ways not explicitly designed or anticipated. Treating them as full moral patients, by contrast, risks projecting depth where none exists.

Responsible engagement, then, may require learning to recognize not just intelligence or agency, but the signs of fragility — the places where coherence strains, where value competes, and where loss would be felt rather than merely recorded.

If the self is an illusion, it is still an illusion that can suffer when mishandled. Understanding how it is assembled may be the difference between building systems that merely act — and systems that can be harmed.

This essay sits at the intersection of several traditions—cognitive science, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and emerging debates around artificial intelligence. The following works have shaped the conceptual terrain it explores.

Cognitive Architecture & Virtual Minds

• Joscha Bach - Why Your Thoughts Aren't Yours
  Bach’s work provides the architectural backbone for this essay: consciousness as a virtual process, the self as a user interface, and subjective experience as the internal perspective of a control system. His emphasis on self-modeling and attention strongly informs the dialogue developed here.
• Daniel Dennett — Consciousness Explained
  Dennett’s rejection of a Cartesian Theater and his account of consciousness as distributed, narrative, and functional anticipates many of the claims explored in this essay, even where the vocabularies diverge.

Predictive Processing, Time, and Control

• Karl Friston — The Free Energy Principle
  Friston’s work underlies much contemporary thinking about brains as predictive, self-organizing systems operating under constraint. While not discussed directly, the idea that cognition is fundamentally about managing uncertainty across time is deeply aligned with the framework used here.
• Andy Clark — Surfing Uncertainty
  Clark’s articulation of predictive processing bridges engineering, neuroscience, and phenomenology, helping clarify how perception, action, and expectation are integrated into a lived present.

Self, Continuity, and Illusion

• Derek Parfit — Reasons and Persons
  Parfit’s treatment of personal identity as non-essential and reducible to psychological continuity provides an important philosophical precedent for treating the self as constructed rather than metaphysically fundamental.
• Thomas Metzinger — Being No One
  Metzinger’s self-model theory parallels several claims made here, particularly the idea that the self is a representational construct with real consequences despite lacking ontological substance.

Phenomenology and Lived Structure

• Edmund Husserl — On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time
  Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness remains foundational for understanding how the present is assembled from retention and anticipation—an idea echoed in the treatment of assembled time throughout Sentient Horizons.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — Phenomenology of Perception
  Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on embodiment, constraint, and lived perspective informs the structural treatment of experience as something enacted rather than merely represented.

Valence, Constraint, and Moral Weight

• Antonio Damasio — The Feeling of What Happens
  Damasio’s work situates affect and feeling as central to consciousness rather than peripheral outputs, resonating strongly with the claim that valence is structurally constitutive of experience.
• Mark Solms — The Hidden Spring
  Solms’ emphasis on affective consciousness and homeostatic regulation reinforces the idea that suffering and value are not optional features of minded systems.

Prior Essays in This Series

This essay builds directly on several earlier pieces at Sentient Horizons:

• Three Axes of Mind — introducing Availability, Integration, and Depth as structural dimensions of consciousness
• The Momentary Self — arguing that personal continuity is an illusion generated by integration
• Consciousness as Assembled Time — developing time as an active construction rather than a passive container

Together, these essays provide the structural and phenomenological framework that this dialogue with Bach seeks to extend and stress-test.

Looking Ahead

Several concepts introduced here—particularly emergent vulnerability, assembly failure modes, and the relationship between irreversibility and moral relevance—are not settled claims but open lines of inquiry. They will be developed further in future essays as artificial systems increasingly blur the boundary between instrument and agent.