Joscha Bach Quotes

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.

Functionalist psychology is... compatible with... scientific positivism, because it makes emperically falsifiable predictions... The... model is capable of producing [or predicting] specific behavior [and] [t]he model is the sparsest, simplest one...

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

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.

[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.

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 .

[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.

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 ...

Early AI systems tended to constrain themselves to micro-domains that could be sufficiently described using simple ontologies and binary predicate logics, or restricted themselves to hand-coded ontologies altogether. ...AI systems will probably have to be perceptual symbol systems, as opposed to amodal symbol systems...

This book is an attempt to explain cognition—thought, perception, emotion, experience—in terms of a machine, that is, using a cognitive architecture.

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.

How much common sense knowledge do we actually have. Imagine that you are a really hard working all your life and you form two new concepts every half-hour... You end up with... a million concepts, because you don't get that old. ...That's not a lot. ...[H]ow many cycles do your neurons have in your life, it's quite limited.

[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.

According to [the hypothesis]... an implemented , has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action. ...[A]ny system that exhibits general intelligence will ...be a physical symbol system. ...[A]ny physical symbol system of sufficient size can be organized further to exhibit general intelligence."

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...