Academics From Germany

"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."

"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..."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"[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 ..."

"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."

"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 ."

"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..."

"[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."

"[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."

"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]."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"... 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."

"[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."

"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."

"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..."

"I have a lot of good things to say about Joscha Bach. He has a deep conceptual understanding of AGI and its grounding in cognitive science, philosophy of mind and neuroscience; a software system embodying a subset of his ideas and doing interesting and useful things; and a concrete plan for what needs to be learned to expand his system and his associated theory gradually toward human-level intelligence. What's more... his approach might work, if extended and grown intelligently from its current state. There aren’t many AGI researchers I can say all that about."

"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]."

"[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."

"During the winter and spring of 1933, the Nazis made a strenuous effort to present themselves as in harmony with conservative German and Prussian traditions, or even as the natural result and outgrowth of these traditions. The nazis made the conservative Prussian past serviceable to their need for political legitimation to an extent hitherto unprecedented. Long before the Second World War, Prussian values became National Socialist values, judged to epitomize the German character, and help up as models to emulate: austerity, thrift, tenacity in the pursuit of one's goals, a preparedness for personal sacrifice, and a willingness to lay down one's life in the service of a higher cause that would win out in the end, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Above all, there was the concept of duty; it was imperative to "fulfill" one's duty of the ' and the . Among other things, made the Prussian past and the values it imputed to it palpable in the form of Grand historic films that enjoyed mass audiences. It was already during the period of the seizure of power that conservatives lost the Deutungshoheit, that is, the prerogative to interpret the great traditions and historical figures of the past, to the Nazis. From 1933 onwards, the Nazis acted as self-appointed guardians of the national heritage. And they did this with greater aplomb, audacity, and-in many instances-more skill than conservative propagandists during the before them."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

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

"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..."

"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."

"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 ..."

"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."

"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."

"[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.""

"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..."

"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."