Joscha Bach Quotes

[I] think of the concepts as the address space for our behavior programs. The behavior programs allow us to recognize objects [also mental objects] and react... [A] large part of that is the physical world that we interact with, which is this thing... basically the navigation of information in space... [I]t's similar to a ... a physics engine that you can use to describe/predict how things that look in a particular way, that feel... a particular way, enough , enough auditory perception... the geometry of all these things... [T]his is probably 80% of what our brain is doing... dealing with that... real time simulation... [I]t's not that hard to understand... [O]ur game engines are already approximating the fidelity of what we can perceive... in the same ball park... just a couple of orders of magnitude away from saturating our perception, from the complexity that [the brain] can produce. ...[T]he computer that you can buy... is able to give a perceptual reality that has the detail that is already in the same ball park as what your brain can process.

What Gödel could show is using classical mathematical semantics you run into contradictions, and because Gödel strongly believed in these semantics... he was shocked. It... shook his world to the core, because in some sense he felt that the world has to be implemented in classical mathematics.

[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.

[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.

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

[T]he quality of a world model eventually does not amount to how "truly" it depicts "reality", but how adequately it encodes the (sensory) patterns.

[W]hile dynamical systems often cannot be effectively computed on a finite state machine (such as a von Neumann computer), they can often be efficiently approximated.

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

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.

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.

Attempts in psychology at overarching theories of the mind have been all but shattered by the influence of behaviorism, and where cognitive psychology has sprung up in its tracks, it rarely acknowledges that there is something as "intelligence per se", as opposed to the individual performance of a group of subjects in an isolated set of experiments.

[N]egligence of internal states of the mind makes it difficult to form conclusive theories of cognition, especially with regard to language... and consciousness, so radical behaviorism... lost its foothold. Yet, methodological behaviorism is still prevalent...

[T]he types of models that we form right now are not sparse enough... which means that, ideally, every potential model state should correspond to a potential world state. So... if you vary states in your model, you always end up with valid world states. ...[O]ur mind is not quite there... an indication is especially what we see in dreams. The older we get, the more boring our dreams become, because we incorporate more and more constraints that we learned about how the world works. So many of the things that we imagine to be possible as children turn out to be constrained by physical and social dynamics, and as a result fewer and fewer things remain possible. It's not because our imagination scales back, but the constraints under which it operates become tighter and tighter. ...So the constraints under which our neural networks operate are almost limitless, which means it's very difficult to get a neural network to imagine things that look real.

You cannot define objective truth without understanding the nature of truth... So what does the brain mean by saying that it's discovered something as truth... A model can be predictive or not... [T]here can be a sense in which a mathematical statement is true because it's defined as true under certain conditions. So it's... a particular state that a variable can have in the assembled game and then you can have a correspondence between systems and talk about truth, which is again a type of model correspondence.

It may not have a why. This might be the wrong direction to ask... [T]here could be no relation in the "why" direction... It doesn't mean that everything has to have a purpose or a cause...