Joscha Bach

[Administrator]

Personal website - bach.ai

facebook.com/joscha.bach

twitter.com/plinz

medium.com/@joschabach

linkedin.com/in/joschabach

Joscha Bach on Wikipedia

 

[Administrator]

AI, consciousness, science & art - Joscha Bach

Published on May 13, 2018

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)

 

[Administrator]

Joscha Bach: We need to understand the nature of AI to understand who we are

Published on Nov 14, 2018

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 enjoyed our conversation immensely and hope you love it too.

During our 130-minute interview with Joscha Bach, we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: the space between academia and professorship; if organisms are algorithms, philosophy, and ethics; growing up in East Germany; science, art, evolution and the meaning of life; mathematics, computing and the limits thereof; the usefulness of useless knowledge; climate change and “the demise of humanity;” artificial intelligence and consciousness; why we are stories in a movie that the brain is creating, the difference between scholars and scientists…

Just some of my favorite quotes from Joscha Bach are:

“If you take this as a computer game metaphor, this is like the best level for humanity to play. And this best level happens to be the last level for humanity to play, as it happens against the backdrop of a dying world. But it’s still the best level.”

“Intelligence is the ability to make models. What is a model? A model is something that explains information. Information is discernable differences at your systemic interface. And the meaning of information is the relationships you discover to changes in other information.”

“Some people think that a simulation can’t be conscious and only a physical system can. But they got it completely backward: a physical system cannot be conscious only a simulation can be conscious. Consciousness is a simulated property of the simulated self.”

“The practice of AI is in a way statistics on steroids. It’s experimental statistics. It’s identifying new functions to model reality.”

 

[Administrator]

Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality | AI Podcast #101 with Lex Fridman

Jun 13, 2020

Joscha Bach is the VP of Research at the AI Foundation, previously doing research at MIT and Harvard. Joscha work explores the workings of the human mind, intelligence, consciousness, life on Earth, and the possibly-simulated fabric of our universe. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast.

Outline:
0:00 - Introduction
3:14 - Reverse engineering Joscha Bach
10:38 - Nature of truth
18:47 - Original thinking
23:14 - Sentience vs intelligence
31:45 - Mind vs Reality
46:51 - Hard problem of consciousness
51:09 - Connection between the mind and the universe
56:29 - What is consciousness
1:02:32 - Language and concepts
1:09:02 - Meta-learning
1:16:35 - Spirit
1:18:10 - Our civilization may not exist for long
1:37:48 - Twitter and social media
1:44:52 - What systems of government might work well?
1:47:12 - The way out of self-destruction with AI
1:55:18 - AI simulating humans to understand its own nature
2:04:32 - Reinforcement learning
2:09:12 - Commonsense reasoning
2:15:47 - Would AGI need to have a body?
2:22:34 - Neuralink
2:27:01 - Reasoning at the scale of neurons and societies
2:37:16 - Role of emotion
2:48:03 - Happiness is a cookie that your brain bakes for itself

 

[Administrator]

Joscha Bach: Nature of Reality, Dreams, and Consciousness

Aug 22, 2021

Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher.

Outline:

0:00 - Introduction
0:33 - Life is hard
2:56 - Consciousness
9:42 - What is life?
19:51 - Free will
33:56 - Simulation
36:06 - Base layer of reality
51:42 - Boston Dynamics
1:00:01 - Engineering consciousness
1:10:30 - Suffering
1:19:24 - Postmodernism
1:23:43 - Psychedelics
1:36:57 - GPT-3
1:45:40 - GPT-4
1:52:05 - OpenAI Codex
1:54:20 - Humans vs AI: Who is more dangerous?
2:11:04 - Hitler
2:16:01 - Autonomous weapon systems
2:23:29 - Mark Zuckerberg
2:29:04 - Love
2:43:18 - Michael Malice and anarchism
3:00:15 - Love
3:04:23 - Advice for young people
3:09:00 - Meaning of life

 

[Administrator]

Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans | Lex Fridman Podcast #392

Aug 1, 2023

Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher.

Outline:

0:00 - Introduction
1:15 - Stages of life
13:37 - Identity
20:12 - Enlightenment
26:43 - Adaptive Resonance Theory
33:31 - Panpsychism
43:31 - How to think
51:25 - Plants communication
1:09:20 - Fame
1:34:57 - Happiness
1:42:15 - Artificial consciousness
1:54:23 - Suffering
1:59:08 - Eliezer Yudkowsky
2:06:44 - e/acc (Effective Accelerationism)
2:12:21 - Mind uploading
2:23:11 - Vision Pro
2:27:25 - Open source AI
2:40:17 - Twitter
2:47:33 - Advice for young people
2:50:29 - Meaning of life