Joscha Bach Quotes

For Turing it wasn't quite so bad. ...[T]uring could see that the solution is to understand that mathematics was computational all along. ...For instance pi in classical mathematics is a value. It's also a function, but it's the same thing. In computation, a function is only a value when you can compute it, and if you cannot compute the last digit of pi, you only have a function. You can plug this function into your local sun, let it run until the sun burns out... This is it. This is the last digit of pi you will know. But it also means that there can be no process in the physical universe, or in any physically realized computer that depends on having known the last digit of pi. ...Which means that there are parts of physics that are defined in such a way that cannot strictly be true, because, assuming that this could be true leads into contradictions.

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.

The last big things that we discovered was the constructivist turn in mathematics... to understand that the parts of mathematics that work are computation. That was a very significant discovery in the first half of the 20th century. ...[I]t hasn't fully permeated philosophy and even physics yet. Physicists checked out the code libraries for mathematics before constructivism became universal. ...Gödel himself ...didn't get it yet. Hilbert could get it. Hilbert saw that [e.g.,] Cantor's set theoretic experiments in mathematics led him to contradictions, and he noticed that with the current semantics we cannot build a computer in mathematics that runs mathematics without crashing, and Gödel... could prove this.

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...

The easiest answer is existence is the default. ...So this is the lowest number of bits that you need to encode this. ...Nonexistence might not be a meaningful notion. ...If everything that can exist, exists... it probably needs to be implementable. The only thing that can be implemented is finite automata so maybe the whole of existence is... a superposition of all finite automata, and we are in some region of the fractal that has the properties that it can contain us. ...Imagine that every automaton is... an operator that acts on some substrate [something that can store information], and as a result you get emergent patterns.

[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.

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.

You need to become unimportant as a subject, that is, if you are a philosopher, believe is not a verb. ...You have to submit to the things that are possibly true and... follow wherever your inquiry leads, but it's not about you, it has nothing to do with you.

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.

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.

Artificial Intelligence was the attempt of thinkers like Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy and others to treat the mind as a computational system, and thereby open its study to experimental exploration by building computational machines that would attempt to replicate the functionality of minds.

[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.

The absence of an understanding of substrate independent machines lead Leibniz to the rejection of mechanist philosophy...

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.

Whereas mathematics is the realm of specification, computation is the realm of implementation; it captures all those systems that can actually be realized.