Joscha Bach Quotes

Because there is no narrow, concise understanding of what constitutes mental activity and what is part of mental processes... cognition, the cognitive sciences and the related notions span a wide and convoluted terrain... most of [which] lies outside psychology... This methodological discrepancy can only be understood in the context of the recent .

The failure to deliver on some of the early, optimistic promises of machine intelligence, as well as cultural opposition, lead to cuts in funding for cognitive AI, and eventually the start of the new discipline of Cognitive Science. ...Cognitive Science did not develop a cohesive methodology and theoretical outlook, and became an umbrella term for neuroscience, AI, cognitive psychology, linguistics and philosophy of mind.

We probably need to build dreaming systems... [P]art of the purpose of dreams is... similar to a... generative adversarial network. We learn certain constraints, and then it produces alternative perspectives on the same set of constraints, so you can recognize it under different circumstances. Maybe we have flying dreams as children because we recreate the objects that we know, the maps that we know, from different perspectives, which also means from the bird's-eye perspective.

Unlike physics, where previously unknown entities and mechanisms... are routinely postulated... and... evidence is sought in favor or against these... psychology shuns [this methodology]... Thus... cognitive psychology shows reluctance... to building unified theories of mental processes. ...Piaget's work ...might be one of the notable exceptions ...

In cognitive science, we currently have two major families of architectures... One, the classical school... characterized as Fodorian Architectures, as... the manipulation of a language of thought, usually expressed as a set of rules and capable of . ...The other family favors distributed approaches and constrains a dynamic system with potentially astronomically many until... behaviors [of] general intelligence are left. This may seem more "natural" and well-tuned... Yet many functional aspects of intelligence... as planning and language, are... much harder to depict using the dynamical systems approach.

Everything we know about ourselves is... ordering... over features available at the interface; we know of mental phenomena only insofar as they are patterns or constructed over patterns.

Minds are software states... Software doesn't have identity. Software in some sense is a physical law. ...The maintenance of the identity is not terminal. It's instrumental to something else. You maintain your identity so you can serve your meaning. So you can do the things that you are supposed to do before you die. ...For most people the fear of death is the fear of dying before they are done with the things that they feel they have to do even though they cannot quite put their finger on... what that is.

There are some animals like elephants that have larger brains than us and they don't seem to be smarter. ...Elephants seem to be autistic. They have very, very good motor control and they're really good with details, but really struggle to see the big picture. ...[Y]ou can make them recreate drawings stroke by stroke... but they cannot reproduce a still life... of a scene... Why is that? Maybe smarter elephants would meditate themselves out of existence because their brains are too large. So... that elephants that were not autistic, they didn't reproduce.

Whereas mathematics is the realm of specification, computation is the realm of implementation; it captures all those systems that can actually be realized.

When the Artificial Intelligence (AI) movement set off fifty years ago, it bristled with ideas and optimism, which have arguably both waned since. The field has regressed into a multitude of relatively well insulated domains like logics, neural learning, case based reasoning, artificial life, robotics, agent technologies, semantic web... each with their own goals and methodologies. The decline of the idea of studying intelligence per se, as opposed to designing systems that perform tasks that would require some measure of intelligence in humans, has progressed to such a degree that we must now rename the original AI idea into Artificial General Intelligence.

[C]omputation is about doing the work... executing a transition function.

How difficult is it to define a brain? We know that the brain must be somewhere hidden in the genome [which] fits in a CD-ROM. It's not that complicated. It's easier than Microsoft Windows. ...[A]bout 2% of the genome is coding for proteins, and maybe about 10%... tells you when to express which protein, and the remainder is mostly garbage. It's old viruses that are left over and it's never been properly deleted [etc.] because there are no real code revisions in the genome. ...How much of this 10%, [i.e.,] about 75 megabytes code for the brain, we don't really know. What we do know is that we share almost all of this with mice. Genetically speaking, a human is a pretty big mouse, with a few bits changed to fix some of the genetic expressions. ...Most of the stuff there is going to code for cells and metabolism and what your body looks like, [etc.]...

For Turing it wasn't quite so bad. ...[T]uring could see that the solution is to understand that mathematics was computational all along. ...For instance pi in classical mathematics is a value. It's also a function, but it's the same thing. In computation, a function is only a value when you can compute it, and if you cannot compute the last digit of pi, you only have a function. You can plug this function into your local sun, let it run until the sun burns out... This is it. This is the last digit of pi you will know. But it also means that there can be no process in the physical universe, or in any physically realized computer that depends on having known the last digit of pi. ...Which means that there are parts of physics that are defined in such a way that cannot strictly be true, because, assuming that this could be true leads into contradictions.

Mathematics is the domain of all formal languages, and allows the expression of arbitrary statements (most of which are uncomputable). Computation may be understood in terms of computational systems, for instance via defining states (which are sets of discernible differences, i.e. bits), and transition functions that let us derive new states.

Artificial Intelligence was the attempt of thinkers like Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy and others to treat the mind as a computational system, and thereby open its study to experimental exploration by building computational machines that would attempt to replicate the functionality of minds.