Joscha Bach Quotes

[T]he designer of a unified architecture is in a similar situation as the cartographers that set out to draw the first maps of the world, based on the reports of traders and explorers returning from expeditions into uncharted waters and journeys to unknown coasts.

[I]nfluences that lead to the study of... mental entities and structures... came from... s and cybernetics, and from formal linguistics. They fostered an understanding that mental activity amounts to ... that can be modeled as... an algorithm—working over states that encode representations.

Computational systems are machines that can be described apriori and systematically, and implemented on every substrate that elicits the causal properties that are necessary to capture the respective states and transition functions.

It's relatively easy to build a neural network that... learns the dynamics. The fact that we haven't done it right so far doesn't mean it's hard... [A] biological organism does it with relatively few neurons. ...[Y]ou build a bunch of neural oscillators that entrain themselves with the dynamics of your body is such a way that the regulator becomes isomorphic and it's modeled with the dynamics that it regulates, and then it's automatic. ...[I]t's only interesting in the sense that it captures attention when the system is off [kelter].

Behaviorism... in the form of ... not only neglected the nature of mental entities as an object of inquiry, but denied their existence...

[W]e are in need of functionalist architectures. That is, we need to make explicit what entities we are going to research, what constitutes these entities conceptually, and how we may capture these concepts.

[T]o encode a brain genetically, based on the hardware that we are using, we need something like at least 500 kilobytes of code... actually... it's going to be a little more, I guess. It sounds like surprisingly little... but in terms of scientific theories this is a lot. ...The universe, according to the core theory of quantum mechanics... it's like half a page of code... to generate the universe. ...[I]f you want to understand evolution, it's like a paragraph... a couple lines, really, to understand an evolutionary process. ...[T]here's lots ...of details that you get afterwards, because this process itself doesn't define what all the animals are going to look like. In a similar way, the code of the universe doesn't tell you what this planet is going to look like and you... are going to look like. It's just defining the rule book.

Just as the extensive theoretical bodies of physics, chemistry, [etc.]... unified theories of cognition are not isolated statements discarded when... predictions [are] refuted. Rather they are paradigms... that direct a research program...

[O]ur best bet is not just to have a single classification with filtering. ...[I]nstead... take the low level of input and get a whole universe of features that is interrelated. ...[W]e have different levels of determinations. At the lowest level we have percepts. At a slightly higher level we have simulations, and on an even higher level we have a concept landscape.

[A] functionalist model of cognitive processes might be implemented as a computer program (computationalism)... hand in hand with... Artificial Intelligence.

Robots are... not going to be the singular route to achieving AGI, and successfully building robots that are performing well in a physical environment does not necessarily engender the solution of the problems of AGI. Whether robotics or virtual agents will be first to succeed in the quest of achieving AGI remains an open question.

Long ago, physics and other natural sciences... had become computational.

All our access to mathematics... is because we do computation. We can understand mathematics because our brain can compute some part of mathematics, very very little of it and to a very constrained complexity, but enough so we can map some of the infinite complexity and noncomputability of mathematics into computational patterns which we can explore.

For a long time people have thought that the universe is written in mathematics... In fact nothing is mathematical. Mathematics is just the domain of formal languages. It doesn't exist. Mathematics starts with a void. Just throw in a few axioms and if those are nice axioms, then you get infinite complexity. Most of it is not computable. In mathematics you can express arbitrary statements, because it's all about formal languages. Many of these statements will not make sense. Many of these statements will make sense in some way, but you cannot test whether they make sense because they're not computable.

At some point you have to understand the comedy of your own situation. If you take yourself seriously, and you are not functional, it ends in tragedy, as it did for Nietzsche. ...[Y]ou find the same thing in Hesse... The Steppenwolf syndrome is classic in all its sense, where you... feel misunderstood by the world and you don't understand that all the misunderstandings are the result of your own lack of self-awareness, because you think that you are [the] prototypical human and the others around you should behave the same way as you expect... based on your innate instincts; and it doesn't work out, and you become a transcendentalist to deal with that. ...It's very... understandable and I have great sympathies for this, to the degree that I can have sympathy for my own intellectual history. But you have to grow out of it.