Joscha Bach

"The radical idea of treating individuals in a society as cells and the society itself as a well-Organized organism is fascism, or course. Probably the most efficient and rationally stringent way of governance, if someone could pull it off in a sustainable way… I rather like the treatment Fascism gets in the Amazon Series ‘The Man in the High Castle’, which explores what would have happened if the Germans and Japanese had won the war: A society that tries to function as a brutal and ruthlessly efficient machine, eliminating all social and evolutionary slack. It is very dark, but not a flat caricature of pointless evil for its own sake."

"too many people, so many mass executions of the elderly and infirm make sense… if the brain discards unused neurons, why shold socieity [sic] keep their equivalent"

"You cannot learn what does not attract your attention. Women tend to find abstract systems, conflicts and mechanisms intrinsically boring."

"I looked up the statistics, black kids in the US have slower cognitive development"

"When the Artificial Intelligence (AI) movement set off fifty years ago, it bristled with ideas and optimism, which have arguably both waned since. The field has regressed into a multitude of relatively well insulated domains like logics, neural learning, case based reasoning, artificial life, robotics, agent technologies, semantic web... each with their own goals and methodologies. The decline of the idea of studying intelligence per se, as opposed to designing systems that perform tasks that would require some measure of intelligence in humans, has progressed to such a degree that we must now rename the original AI idea into Artificial General Intelligence."

"Attempts in psychology at overarching theories of the mind have been all but shattered by the influence of behaviorism, and where cognitive psychology has sprung up in its tracks, it rarely acknowledges that there is something as "intelligence per se", as opposed to the individual performance of a group of subjects in an isolated set of experiments."

"AI’s gradual demotion from a science of the mind to the nerdy playpen of engineering was accompanied not by utterances of disappointment, but by a chorus of glee, uniting those wary of human technological hubris with the same factions of society that used to oppose evolutionary theory or materialistic monism..."

"Long ago, physics and other natural sciences... had become computational."

"MicroPsi is a cognitive model that represents the author’s attempt to contribute to the discussion of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)..."

"[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."

"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..."

"For all practical purposes, the universe is a pattern generator, and the mind "makes sense" of these patterns by encoding them according to the regularities it can find. Thus, the representation of a concept in an intelligent system is not a pointer to a "thing in reality", but a set of hierarchical constraints over (for instance perceptual) data."

"[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."

"Robots are... not going to be the singular route to achieving AGI, and successfully building robots that are performing well in a physical environment does not necessarily engender the solution of the problems of AGI. Whether robotics or virtual agents will be first to succeed in the quest of achieving AGI remains an open question."

"General intelligence is not only the ability to reach a given goal (and usually, there is some very specialized, but non-intelligent way to reach a singular fixed goal, such as winning a game of chess), but includes the setting of novel goals, and most important of all, about exploration. ...[A]n environment with fixed tasks, scaled by an agent with pre-defined goals is not going to make a good benchmark problem for AGI."

"[M]otivation... does not arise from intelligence itself, but from a motivational system underlying all directed behavior. ...[T]here is no reason that could let us take behavioral tendencies such as self-preservation, energy conservation, altruistic behavior for granted—they... have... to be designed [including by evolutionary methods] into the system..."

"Because a naked ontological dualism between mind and body/world is notoriously hard to defend, it is sometimes covered up by wedging the popular notion of emergence into the "explanatory gap"... "strong emergence" is basically an anti-AI proposal."

"In cognitive science, we currently have two major families of architectures... One, the classical school... characterized as Fodorian Architectures, as... the manipulation of a language of thought, usually expressed as a set of rules and capable of . ...The other family favors distributed approaches and constrains a dynamic system with potentially astronomically many until... behaviors [of] general intelligence are left. This may seem more "natural" and well-tuned... Yet many functional aspects of intelligence... as planning and language, are... much harder to depict using the dynamical systems approach."

"MicroPsi is an implementation of ’s Psi theory... MicroPsi is an attempt to embody the principles discussed above..."

"Symbolic reasoning falls short not only in modeling low level behaviors but is also difficult to ground into real world interactions and to scale upon dynamic environments... This has lead many... to abandon symbolic systems... and... focus on parallel distributed, entirely sub-symbolic approaches... well suited for many learning and control tasks, but difficult to apply [in] areas such as reasoning and language."

"[D]espite inevitable difficulties and methodological problems, the design of unified architectures modeling the breadth of mental capabilities in a single system is a crucial stage in understanding the human mind..."

"[T]he designer of a unified architecture is in a similar situation as the cartographers that set out to draw the first maps of the world, based on the reports of traders and explorers returning from expeditions into uncharted waters and journeys to unknown coasts."

"[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."

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

"Cognitive architectures are... Leibnizian machines... designed to bring forth the feats of cognition, and built to allow us to enter... examine them, and to watch their individual parts... pushing and pulling... thereby explaining how a mind works."

"Our... cognitive architecture is based on a formal [psychological] theory... the PSI theory... [which] has been turned into a computational model... MicroPSI... partially implemented as a computer program."

"[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 ..."

"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 ."

"Behaviorism... in the form of ... not only neglected the nature of mental entities as an object of inquiry, but denied their existence..."

"[N]egligence of internal states of the mind makes it difficult to form conclusive theories of cognition, especially with regard to language... and consciousness, so radical behaviorism... lost its foothold. Yet, methodological behaviorism is still prevalent..."

"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 ..."

"[I]nfluences that lead to the study of... mental entities and structures... came from... s and cybernetics, and from formal linguistics. They fostered an understanding that mental activity amounts to ... that can be modeled as... an algorithm—working over states that encode representations."

"Functional constructivism is based on... philosophical constructivism... that all knowledge about the world is based on... our systematic interface. ...We do not ...recognize ...objects of our environment; we construct them over the regularities ...at the system interface of our cognitive system."

"To perceive means... to find order over patterns; these orderings are what we call objects. ...[I]t amounts to ...identification of these objects by their related patterns ...intuitively ...its features ..."

"Everything we know about ourselves is... ordering... over features available at the interface; we know of mental phenomena only insofar as they are patterns or constructed over patterns."

"What the universe makes visible... to any observer... is... functionality."

"[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."

"To understand... mind, we have to ask how a system capable of constructing has to be built..."

"[A] functionalist model of cognitive processes might be implemented as a computer program (computationalism)... hand in hand with... Artificial Intelligence."

"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.""

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

"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..."

"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..."

"What's the best algorithm that you should be using to fix your world model? ...This question ...has been answered for the first time by in the 1960s. He discovered an algorithm that you can apply when you've discovered that you're a robot and all you've got is data. What is the world like? ...[H]is algorithm is... a combination of Bayesian Reasoning, Induction and Occam's Razor. ...[W]e can mathematically prove that we cannot do better than Solomonoff Induction. Unfortunately, Solomonoff Induction is not quite computable."

"[E]verything that we're going to do is some approximation of Solomonoff Induction. ...[O]ur concepts cannot really refer to facts in the world out there. We do not get the truth by referring to stuff out there in the world. We get meaning by suitably encoding the patterns in our systemic interface."

"AI has recently made huge progress in encoding data at perceptual interfaces. is about using a stacked hierarchy of feature detectors. ...[W]e use pattern detectors and we build them into networks that are arranged in hundreds of layers and then we adjust the links between these layers, usually using some kind of . ...[Y]ou can use this to classify [e.g.,] images and parts of speech. ...[W]e get to features that are more and more complex. They start with these very... simple patterns, and then get more and more complex until we get to object categories. ...[N]ow the systems are able, in image recognition tasks, to approach performance that's very similar to human performance. ...[I]t seems to be somewhat similar to what the brain seems to be doing in visual processing."

"If you take the activation at different levels of these networks and you... enhance this activation a little... you get stuff that looks very psychadelic, which might be similar to what happens if you put certain illegal substances into people and enhance the activity on certain layers of their visual processing."

"[O]ur best bet is not just to have a single classification with filtering. ...[I]nstead... take the low level of input and get a whole universe of features that is interrelated. ...[W]e have different levels of determinations. At the lowest level we have percepts. At a slightly higher level we have simulations, and on an even higher level we have a concept landscape."

"How does... representation by simulation work? ...If you are a brain and you want to understand sound, you have to model it. ...Neurons do not want to do 20 Khz. That's way too fast for them. They like something like 20 Hz. So... you need to make a [which] measures the amount of energy at different frequencies. ...This ...in our ears ...transforms energy of sound at different frequency intervals into energy measurements... This is something that the brain can model. ...[A] neurosimulator tries to recreate these patterns. If it can predict the next input from the cochlea, then it understands the sound."

"If we want to understand music we have to go beyond understanding sound. We have to understand the transformations that sound can have if you play a different pitch. We have to arrange the sound in a sequencer that gives you rhythms, and so on, and then we want to identify some kind of musical grammar that we can use to... control the sequencer. So we have stacked structures that simulate the world. ...If you want to model a world of music you need to have the lowest level of the precepts, then the higher levels of mental simulations, which give the sequences... and the grammars of music... [B]eyond this you have the conceptual landscape that you can use to describe the different styles of music. ...[I]f you go up in the hierarchy, you get to more and more abstract models, more and more conceptual models, and more and more analytic models. ...[T]hese are causal models..."