Science, Technology & the Future
What is consciousness? “I think under certain circumstances being conscious is an important part of a mind; it’s a model of a model of a model basically. What it means is our mind (our new cortex) produces this dream that we take to be the world based on the sensory data – so it’s basically a hallucination that predicts what next hits your retina – that’s the world. Out there, we don’t know what this is.. The universe is some kind of weird pattern generator with some quantum properties. And this pattern generator throws patterns at us, and we try to find regularity in them – and the hidden layers of this neural network amount to latent variables that are colors people sounds ideas and so on.. And this is the world that we subjectively inhabit – that’s the world that we find meaningful.”
… “I find theories [about consciousness] that make you feel good very suspicious. If there is something that is like my preferred outcome for emotional reasons, I should be realising that I have a confirmation bias towards this – and that truth is a very brutal vector”..
Joscha Bach, Ph.D. is an AI researcher who worked and published about cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. He earned his Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and has built computational models of motivated decision making, perception, categorization, and concept-formation. He is especially interested in the philosophy of AI and in the augmentation of the human mind.
Joscha has taught computer science, AI, and cognitive science at the Humboldt-University of Berlin and the Institute for Cognitive Science at Osnabrück. His book “Principles of Synthetic Intelligence” (Oxford University Press) is available on amazon now:
https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Synthetic-Intelligence-PSI-Architectures/dp/0195370678
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Excellent video. I'm so glad to see this philosophy is becoming more popular. Very nice reference to Nagel. I would add that we should steer away from the label of "experience" and towards perception as a set of "predictions". The label of "experience" or "qualia" could be only an inaccurate label for the set of many prediction frames happening over a short period time, such that like a film, are a time-series that brains cannot separate into parts easily. To call this chain of fast predictions an "experience" is to give it a pregnant label which misrepresents it into a duality of observerobservation, which in itself may be an illusion. There may be only "observations" aka predictions that are being mislabeled into a false category (a separate inner selfobserver) and therefore prompting a dialoguedebate which cannot be resolved. Perhaps we cannot find the observer, because there never was one.
AI is the most boring and stupid subject of our days. =)))))))))))))))))) Consciousness has nothing to do with AI. Wake up!
Joscha Bach: one of the most consistent and concise thinkers of our time. I'd love to see a popular science book by him. A very long one.
An ego trying to capture consciousness.