Joscha Bach

"[C]ausal models can be weakly deterministic, basically associative models, which tell you if this state [S1] happens, it is quite probable that this one [S2] comes afterwards. Or you can get to a strongly determined model... one which tells you, if you are in this state [S1], and this condition [c1] is met, you're going to go exactly in this state [S2]. If this state is not met, or a different condition [c2] is met, you go into this state [S3]. And this is what we call an algorithm. Now you're in the domain of computation."

"For a long time people have thought that the universe is written in mathematics... In fact nothing is mathematical. Mathematics is just the domain of formal languages. It doesn't exist. Mathematics starts with a void. Just throw in a few axioms and if those are nice axioms, then you get infinite complexity. Most of it is not computable. In mathematics you can express arbitrary statements, because it's all about formal languages. Many of these statements will not make sense. Many of these statements will make sense in some way, but you cannot test whether they make sense because they're not computable."

"Computation is different. Computation can exist. It starts with an initial state, and then you have a transition function. You do the work. You apply the transition function [and] you get into the next state. Computation is always finite."

"Mathematics is the kingdom of specification and computation is the kingdom of implementation. It's very important to understand this difference."

"All our access to mathematics... is because we do computation. We can understand mathematics because our brain can compute some part of mathematics, very very little of it and to a very constrained complexity, but enough so we can map some of the infinite complexity and noncomputability of mathematics into computational patterns which we can explore."

"[C]omputation is about doing the work... executing a transition function."

"[W]e saw that mental representation is about percepts, mental simulations, conceptual representations... [C]onceptual representations give us concept spaces, and... these concept spaces... give us an interface for our mental representations we can use to address and manipulate them, and we can share them in cultures. [T]hese concepts are compositional. We can put them together to create new concepts. ...[T]hey can be described using higher dimensional vector spaces. They [vectors] don't do mental simulation and prediction, and so on, but we can capture regularity in our concepts with them."

"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."

"[T]here is another type of mental representation that is linguistic protocols, which is... a form of grammar and a vocabulary. ...[W]e need these ...protocols to transfer mental representations between people ...by scannning our ...representations, disassembling them ...and ...we use a discrete set of symbols to get this to somebody else... [who] trains an assembler that reverses this process and builds something that is... similar to what we intended to convey."

"[I]f you look at the progression of AI models, it... went the opposite direction. ...AI started with linguistic protocols, which were expressed in formal grammars, and then it got to concept spaces, and now it's about to address percepts. ...At some point in the near future it's going to get better at mental simulations and at some point after that we'll get to attention directed and motivationally connected systems that make sense of the world, that are in some sense able to address meaning. This is the hardware that we have..."

"How difficult is it to define a brain? We know that the brain must be somewhere hidden in the genome [which] fits in a CD-ROM. It's not that complicated. It's easier than Microsoft Windows. ...[A]bout 2% of the genome is coding for proteins, and maybe about 10%... tells you when to express which protein, and the remainder is mostly garbage. It's old viruses that are left over and it's never been properly deleted [etc.] because there are no real code revisions in the genome. ...How much of this 10%, [i.e.,] about 75 megabytes code for the brain, we don't really know. What we do know is that we share almost all of this with mice. Genetically speaking, a human is a pretty big mouse, with a few bits changed to fix some of the genetic expressions. ...Most of the stuff there is going to code for cells and metabolism and what your body looks like, [etc.]..."

"[T]o encode a brain genetically, based on the hardware that we are using, we need something like at least 500 kilobytes of code... actually... it's going to be a little more, I guess. It sounds like surprisingly little... but in terms of scientific theories this is a lot. ...The universe, according to the core theory of quantum mechanics... it's like half a page of code... to generate the universe. ...[I]f you want to understand evolution, it's like a paragraph... a couple lines, really, to understand an evolutionary process. ...[T]here's lots ...of details that you get afterwards, because this process itself doesn't define what all the animals are going to look like. In a similar way, the code of the universe doesn't tell you what this planet is going to look like and you... are going to look like. It's just defining the rule book."

"[T]he genome defines the rule book by which our brain is built. The brain boots itself, in a development process, and this booting takes some time... formation learning in which some connections are formed, basic models are built of the world so we can operate in it. How long does this booting take... about 80 megaseconds. That's the time a child is awake until it's 3 1/2 years old. By this age you understand Star Wars, and I think everything after Star Wars is cosmetics."

"Mathematics is the domain of all formal languages, and allows the expression of arbitrary statements (most of which are uncomputable). Computation may be understood in terms of computational systems, for instance via defining states (which are sets of discernible differences, i.e. bits), and transition functions that let us derive new states."

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

"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."

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

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"... 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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"[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."

"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]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."

"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."

"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]."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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