Joscha Bach Quotes

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...

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.

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.

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."

[M]editation is... just a bunch of techniques that let you control attention. ...[W]hen you can control attention you can get access to your own source code, hopefully not before you understand what you are doing, and then you can change the way it works, temporarily or permanently. ...Everything else is downstream from controlling attention.

[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.

[T]aking [the design of a cognitive architecture] to the AI laboratory... requires the theory not merely to be plausible, but... requires it to be fit for implementation, and delivers it to the... merciless battle of testing.

Normally we only get attention in the parts of our mind that create heat, where you have a mismatch between [the] model and the results that are happening. So most people are not self-aware, because their control is too good. If everything works out roughly the way you want, and the only things that don't work out are whether your football team wins, then you will mostly have models about these domains. ...It's only when... your fundamental relationships through the world don't work [that, attention or self-awareness arises].

The goal of building cognitive architectures is to achieve an understanding of mental processes by constructing testable information processing models.

[T]he notions we process... are systematically structured information, making up a dynamic system. The description of such... is the domain of cybernetics or systems science... constructive methods that allow the representation of functionality.

[T]he relationship between cognition and neurobiological processes might be similar to the one between a car engine and locomotion. ...[A] car's locomotion is facilitated mainly by its engine, but the understanding of the engine does not aid much in finding out where the car goes. ...[T]he integration of... parts, the intentions of the driver and even the terrain might be more crucial ...

[T]here also seems to be a particular kind of ground truth, [e.g.,] you are confronted with the enormity of something existing at all. ...It's stunning when you realize something exists, rather than nothing. ...[T]his seems to be true. There is an absolute truth in the fact that something seems to be happening.

The fuzzy idea is the one of continuous existence. We don't have continuous existence... because it's not computable. There is no continuous process. The only thing that binds you together with the last week and from yesterday is the illusion that you have memories about them. So if you want to upload, it is very easy. You make a machine that thinks it's you. ...It's the same thing that you are. You are a machine that thinks it's you.

[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.

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.