Top 15 Joscha Bach Quotes

Arguably most people are not generally intelligent, because they don't have to solve problems that make them generally intelligent. ...[I]t's not yet clear if we are smart enough to build AI and understand our own nature to this degree... [I]t could be a matter of capacity, and for most people it's... a matter of interest. They don't see the point because the benefits of attempting this project are marginal, because you're probably not going to succeed... and the cost... requires complete dedication of your entire life.

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.

[E]verything else are ideas about the world, and I suspect that they are relatively sparse, and also the intuitive models that we form about social interaction. ...[T]he priors are present in most social animals ... Many domestic social animals ...have better social cognition than children.

[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.

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.

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].

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.

[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.

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].

[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.

[Y]ou don't know this state in which you don't have a self. You can turn off yourself... You can... meditate yourself [into] a state where you are still conscious, where still things are happening, where you know everything that you knew before, but you're no longer identified with changing anything. ...[T]his means that your self ...dissolves. There is no longer this person... you know that this person construct exists in other states and it runs on this brain... but it's not a real thing. It's a construct. It's an idea... and you can change that idea, and if you let go of this idea... If you don't think you are special, you realize it's just one of many people, and it's not your favorite person even... It's just one of many, and it's the one that you are doomed to control... and that is... informing the actions of this organism as a control model. This is all there is, and you are somehow afraid that this control model gets interrupted, or loses the identity of continuity.

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.

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.

... Facebook... Twitter... are companies that... own a protocol... imposed on a community and... [and have] different components for monetization... user management... user display... rating... anonymity... for import of other content... Imagine that you take these components of the protocol apart and... communities are allowed to mix and match their protocols, and design new ones... [e.g.,] the UI and the UX can be defined by the community, the rules for sharing content across communities can be defined, the monetization... the way you reward individual users... the way users represent themselves... can become part of the protocol... [I]n some communities it will be a single person that comes up with these things; in others it's a group of friends. Some might implement a voting scheme... Who knows what might be the best self-organizing principle for this. ...It can be automated so people can write software for this. ...Let's not make an assumption about this thing if you don't know the right solution... In most areas there is no idea whether it will be people designing this ad-hoc, or machines doing this. Whether you want to enforce compliance by social norms, like , or with software solutions, or with AI that goes through the post-op people, or with a legal principle... If you let the communities evolve, and you just control it in such a way that you are incentivizing the most sentient communities. The ones that produce the most interesting behaviors, that allow you to interact in the most helpful ways to the individuals. ...So that you have a network that gives... information that is relevant to you. It helps you to maintain relationships to others in healthy ways. It allows you to build teams... to... bring the best of you into this thing and goes into the coupling, into a relationship with others in which you produce things that you would be unable to produce alone.

I don't actually have an identity beyond the identity that I construct. ...[T]he Dalai Lama... identifies as a form of government. [He] gets reborn, not because he is confused, but because he is not identifying as a human being. He runs on a human being. He's... a governmental software that is instantiated in every new generation anew. So his advisors will pick someone who does this in the next generation. So if you identify with this, you are no longer human and you don't die in this sense... only the body that you run on. To kill the Dalai Lama you'd have to kill his tradition.