Computer Scientists

"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.""

"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."

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

"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."

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

"[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."

"[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."

"Joscha bach my Al guy i brought to martin from berlin. = smart but unpolished"

"Joscha Bach has written a blog post criticizing my suggestion that the universe as a whole is, in a sense, akin to a cosmic nervous system. ...Bach and I have engaged... in an extensive email exchange discussing precisely the points he brought up in his blog post. ...[H]e chose to make his criticisms public now, whilst ignoring the many clarifications I sent him by email back then. ...Bach's criticisms are straw-men; every single one of them."

"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."

"Joscha Bach is one of those rare people whose primary motivation is unbound curiosity and inspiration. He clearly loves what he does and you can’t help but notice his radiating passion and youthful exuberance. Joscha has an impressively wide and deep knowledge in a variety of scientific, philosophical and artistic disciplines and I had to do my best just to keep up with Bach’s brilliant fast-paced mind and stream of consciousness."

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

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

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"[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."

"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]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."

"With this vector space you can do amazing things, [e.g.,] if you take the vector from king to queen, it's pretty much the same vector as between man and woman. ...[B]ecause [these concept spaces are] really a high dimension manifold, we can do interesting things like machine translation without understanding what it means, that is, without doing any proper mental representation that predicts the world. ...[T]his is [a] type of mental representation that is somewhat incomplete, but it captures the landscape that we share in a culture."

"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."

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

"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."

"[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 ..."

"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."

"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."

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

"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..."

"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..."

"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."

"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..."

"[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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

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

"[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."

"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 ..."

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

"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 ."

"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."

"I propose an idealist ontology that makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism, bottom-up panpsychism, and cosmopsychism. The proposed ontology also offers more explanatory power than these three alternatives, in that it does not fall prey to the hard problem of consciousness, the combination problem, or the decombination problem, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters."