YouSaid · the spoken record

Joscha Bach

lines on the record: 241
first: 2020-06-13
most recent: 2020-06-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So the direction in which I think our research is going to go is going to, for instance, what you notice in perception is our perceptual models of the world are not probabilistic but possibilistic, which means You should be able to perceive things that are improbable but possible. The actual state is valid, not if it's probable, but if it's possible, if it's coherent. So, if you see a tiger coming after you should be able to see this, even if it's unlikely. And the probability is necessary for convergence of the model. So given the state of possibilities that is very, very large and a set of perceptual features, how should you change the state of states of the model to get it to convert with your perception?”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a very general way of thinking about models, but we have to use a different approach to make it work. We have to find different networks that train the Boltzmann machine. So the mechanism that trains the Boltzmann machine and the mechanism that makes the Boltzmann machine settle into its state are distinct from the constrained architecture of the Boltzmann machine itself.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very difficult to, despite having this global measure, to train it. Because as soon as you add more than trivially few elements, parameters into the system, it's very difficult to get it settled in the right architecture. And so the solution that Hinton and Zanovsky found was to use a restricted Boltzmann machine, which uses the hidden links, the internal links in the Bosman machine, and only has basically the input and output layer. But this limits the expressivity of the Bolsman machine. So now he builds a network of small of these primitive Boltzmann machines. And then some sense, you can see an almost continuous development from this to the deep learning models that we are using today. Even though we don't use Bolsman machines at this point. But the idea of the Bolshevik machine is you take this model, you clamp some of the values to perception, and this forces the entire machine to go into a state that is compatible with the states that you currently perceive. And this state is your model of the world.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that language is a particular way, or the natural language that we're using is a particular level of abstraction that we use to communicate with each other. But the languages in which we express geometry are not grammatical languages in the same sense. So they work slightly different. They're more general expressions of functions. And I think the general nature of a model is you have a bunch of parameters. These are have a range. These are the variances of the world. And you have relationships between them which are constraints, which say if certain parameters have these values, then other parameters have to have the following values. And this is a very early insight in computer science. And I think some of the earliest formulations is the Boltzmann machine. And the problem with the Boltzmann machine is that while it has a measure of whether it's good, this is basically the energy on the system, the amount of tangent that you have left in the constraints where the constraints don't quite match.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agree with Witgenstein. I just agree with the late Wittgenstein. And I also agree with the beauty of the early Wittgenstein. I think that the Tractatus itself is probably the most beautiful philosophical text that was written in the 20th century.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To learn linear algebra and then compute an approximation of this geometry, but to equate language and geometry is not an efficient way to think about it.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outsyc is a productive project. It's just probably not one that is going to converge to general intelligence. The thing that Wittgenstein couldn't solve, and he looked at this in his book at the end of his life, Philosophical Investigations, was the notion of images. So images play an important role in Tractatus, that Tractatus is an attempt to basically turn philosophy into logical probing language, to design a logical language in which you can do actual philosophy that's rich enough for doing this. And the difficulty was to deal with perceptual content. And eventually, I think he decided that he was not able to solve it. And I think this preempted the failure of the Logitus program in AI. And the solution, as we see it today, is we need more general function approximation. There are functions, geometric functions, that we learn to approximate that cannot be efficiently expressed and computed in a grammatical language. We can, of course, build automata that go via number theory and so on.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wittkins Diane thought that we can build everything from language, from basically a logical grammatical construct. And I think to some degree this was also what Minsky believed. So that's why he focused so much on common sense reasoning and so on. And a project that was inspired by him was Psych. Yes, of course, ideas don't die. Only people die.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it can also be in a nominal sense or in lexical sense that you say this word does not only refer to this class of objects, but it refers to a definite object, to some kind of agent that waves their way through the story and is only referred by different ways in the language. So the language is basically a projection from a conceptual representation, from a scene that is evolving into a discrete string of symbols. And what the transformer is able to do, it learns aspects of this projection mechanism that other models couldn't learn.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The system can learn things that other systems couldn't before it makes, for instance, possible to write a text where it talks about the scientists, then the scientist is a name and has a pronoun, and it gets a consistent story about that thing. What it does not do, it doesn't fully integrate this. So these meaning falls apart at some point, it loses track of this context. It does not yet understand that everything that it says has to refer to the same universe. And this is where this thing falls apart. But the attention in the transformer model does not go beyond tracking identity. And tracking identity is an important part of attention, but it's a different very specific attention mechanism. It's not the one that gives rise to the type of consciousness that we have.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it seemed to be the most similar to this program because it somehow maximized the possibility of translating the concept bet into German in the same sentence. And there's some mistake that the transformer model is not doing because it's tracking identity. And the attention mechanism in the transformer model is basically putting its finger on individual concepts and make sure that these concepts pop up later in the text and tracks basically the individuals through the text. And it's...”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite. I think it models only one aspect of attention. In the early days of automated language translation, there was a example that I found particularly funny where somebody tried to translate a text from English into German and it was a bad broke the window. And the translation in German was to translate back into English a bad this flying mammal broke the window with a baseball bat.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mechanism, so it's reflexive, but also in part because your attention lapses if you don't pay attention to the attention itself. So it's this thing that I'm currently seeing, just a dream that my brain has spun off into some kind of daydream? Or am I still paying attention to my percepts? So you have to periodically go back and see whether you're still paying attention. And if you have this loop and you make it tight enough between the system becoming aware of the contents of its attention and the fact that it's paying attention itself and makes attention the object of its attention, I think this is the loop over which we wake up.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get old enough to play Go the way that our machines learn to play Go. So instead what we do is an attention-based learning. We pinpoint the probable region in the network where we can make an improvement. And then we store this binding state together with the expected outcome in a protocol. This ability to make indexed memories for the purpose of learning to revisit these commitments later, this requires a memory of the contents of our attention. Another aspect is when I construct my reality, I make mistakes. So I see things that turn out to be reflections or shadows and so on, which means I have to be able to point out which features of my perception gave rise to present construction of reality. So the system needs to pay attention to the features that are currently in its focus. And it also needs to pay attention to whether it pays attention itself, in part because the attentional system gets trained with the same method.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's got consciousness is largely a model of the contents of your attention. It's a mechanism that has evolved for a certain type of learning. At the moment, our machine learning systems largely work by building chains of weighted sums of real numbers with some nonlinearity. And you learn by piping an error signal through these different chained layers and adjusting the weights. And these weighted sums. And you can approximate most polynomials with this if you have enough training data. But the price is you need to change a lot of these weights. Basically, the error is piped backwards into the system until it accumulates at certain junctures in the network. And everything else evens out statistically. And only at these junctures, this is where you had the actual error in the network and you make the change there. This is a very slow process and our brains don't have enough time for that because we don't.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think the feeling, flavor and so on is given by the relationship that a feature has to all the other features. It's basically a giant relational graph that is our subjective universe. The color is given by those aspects of the representation or this experiential color where you care about, where you have identifications, where something means something, where you are the inside of a feedback loop and the dimensions of caring are basically dimensions of this motivational system that we emerge over.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work in the limit that you get by building an infinite series that converges. For those parts where it converges is geometry, for those parts where it doesn't converge, it's chaos.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's because they are represented probably with oscillators, right? So that's why colors form a circle of use. And colors have harmonics, sounds have harmonics as a result of synchronizing oscillators in the brain, right? So the world that we subjectively interact with is fundamentally the result of the representation mechanisms in our brain. They are mathematically to some degree universal. There are certain regularities that you can discover in the patterns and not others. But the patterns that we get, this is not the real world, the world that we interact with is always made of too many parts to count, right? So when you look at this table and so on, it's consisting of so many molecules and atoms that you cannot count them. So you only look at the aggregate dynamics at limit dynamics. If you had almost infinitely many patterns, particles, what would be the dynamics of the table? And this is roughly what you get. So geometry that we are interacting with is the result of discovering those operators that”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physics that we experience is not the real physics. There are no color and sound in the real world. Color and sound are types of representations that you get if you want to model reality with oscillators, right? So colors and sound in some sense have octaves.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A representation that you can get agency over if you care. So basically, you can choose what you identify with if you want to.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You put it the other way. Identity is a software state, it's a construction. Not physically real. Identity is not a physical concept. It's basically a representation of different objects on the same line.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To kill the Dalai Lama, you would have to kill his tradition. And if we look at ourselves, we realize that we are to a small part like this, most of us. So for instance, if you have children, you realize something lives on. In them, or if you spark an idea in the world, something lives on, or if you identify with a society around you, because you are part dead. You're not just this human being.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My implementation ceases. So basically the thing that implements myself will no longer be present. Which means if I am not implemented on the minds of other people, the thing that I identify with the weird thing is I don't actually have an identity beyond the identity that I construct. If I was the Dalai Lama, he identifies as a form of government. So basically the Dalai Lama 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 basically a governmental software. That is instantiated in every new generation in you. So his advisors will pick someone who does this in the next generation. So if you identify with this, you are no longer a human and you don't die in the sense. So what dies is only the body of the human that you run on.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think quite clearly the latter, that's at least a much easier explanation because it allows us to make causal models. And I don't see any way to construct an inverse causality.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seems that the parts of the world that are not deterministic are not long-lived. So if you build a system, any kind of automaton, so if you build simulations of something, you'll notice that the phenomena that endure are those that give rise to stable dynamics. So basically, if you see anything that is complex in the world, it's the result of usually of some control, of some feedback that keeps it stable around certain attractors. And the things that are not stable that don't give rise to certain harmonic patterns and so on, they tend to get weeded out over time. So if we are in a region of the universe that sustains complexity, which is required to implement minds like ours, this is going to be a region of the universe that is very tightly controlled and controllable. So it's going to have lots of interesting symmetries and also symmetry breaks that allow to the creation of structure.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is no trick involved, so basically when I know something about myself, it's because I made a model. Part of your brain is tasked with modeling what other parts of your brain are doing.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You do exist in almost similar way as me. So their internal states that are less accessible for me that you have and so on. And my model might not be completely adequate. There are also things that I might perceive about you that you don't perceive. But in some sense, both you and me are some puppets, two puppets that enact this play in my mind. And I identify with one of them because I can control one of the puppets directly. And with the other one, I can create things in between. So for instance, we can go on an interaction that even leads to a coupling, to a feedback loop. So we can think things together in a certain way or feel things together. But this coupling is itself not a physical phenomenon. It's entirely a software phenomenon. It's a result of two different implementations interacting with each other.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a virtual person. And you and me happen to be this virtual person. So this virtual person gets access to the language center and talks about this guy being blue. And this is us.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if you look at a book by St. George R. Martin where the characters have plausible psychology and they stand on a hill because they want to conquer the city below the hill and they're dawn in it and they look at the color of the sky and they are apprehensive and feel empowered and all these things. Why do they have these emotions? It's because it's written into the story, right? And it's written into the story because it's an adequate model of the person that predicts what they're going to do next. And the same thing is true for us. So it's basically a story that our brain is writing. It's not written in words. It's written in perceptual content, basically multimedia content. And it's a model of what the person would feel if it existed.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so these prayers that you commit to are largely target values that our needs should approach, set points. And this deviation to the set point creates some urge, some tension. And we find ourselves living inside of feedback loops, right? The consciousness emerges over dimensions of disagreements with the universe, things where you care, things are not the way they should be, where you need to regulate. And so in some sense, the sense itself is the result of all the identifications that you're having. An identification is a regulation target that you're committing to. It's a dimension that you care about. Do you think is important? And this is also what locks you in if you let go of these commitments, of these identifications, you get free. There's nothing that you have to do anymore. And if you let go of all of them, you're completely free and you can enter Nirvana because you are done.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, a result of the purpose that the mind has. It's a tool for modeling, right? We are not actually monkeys. We are side effects of the regulation needs of monkeys. And what the monkey has to regulate is the relationship of an organism to an outside world that is in large part also consisting of other organisms. And as a result, it basically has regulation targets that it tries to get to, these regulation targets. Uncongestional reflexes that we are more or less born with, and then we can reverse engineer them to make them more consistent. And then we get more detailed models about how the world works and how to interact with it.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually I try to use the terminology so that the mind is basically principles that produce the simulation. It's the software that is implemented by your brain. And the mind is creating both the universe that we are in and the self, the idea of a person that is on the other side of attention and is embedded in this world.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we see that most of the domains of mathematics that we have discovered are in some sense describing the same fractals. This is what category theory is obsessed about, that you can map these different domains to each other. So they're not that many fractals. And some of these have interesting structure in symmetry breaks. And so you can discover what region of this global fractal you might be embedded in from first principles. But the only way you can get there is from first principles. So basically you are understanding of the universe has to start with automata and then number theory and then spaces and so on.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine you would find yourself embedded into a maddleboard fractal and you try to figure out what works and you have somehow a Turing machine with enough memory to think. And as a result, you come to this idea. It must be some kind of automaton. And maybe you just enumerate all the possible automata until you get to the one that produces your reality. So you can identify necessary insufficient condition. For instance, we discover that mathematics itself is the domain of all languages”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So at this level, you have the spiral, and then you discover the spiral moves to the right, and some point it disappears. So, you have a singularity. At this point, your model is no longer valid. You cannot predict what happens beyond the singularity. But you can observe again, and you will see it hit another spiral. And at this point, it disappeared. So we now have a second order law. And if you make 30 layers of these laws, then you have a description of the world that is similar to the one that we come up with when we describe the reality around us. It's reasonably predictive. does not cut to the core of it. Explain how it's being generated How it actually works It's relatively good to explain the universe that we are entangled with.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This gives you this shape of this fractal. But imagine you live inside of this fractal and you don't have access to where you are in the fractal or you have not discovered the generator function even so what you see is all I can see right now is this viral and this viral moves a little bit to the right is this an accurate model of reality yes it is right it is an adequate description you know that there is actually no spiral in the mailboard fractal it only appears like this to an observer that is interpreting things as a two-dimensional space and then defines certain regularities in there at a certain scale that currently observes because if you zoom in the spiral might disappear and turn out to be something different at a different resolution right”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine you look at a mandalboard fractal, right? This famous thing that Bernard Manderbrod. If you see an overall shape in there, right, but you know if you truly understand it, you know it's two lines of code. It's basically a series that is being tested for complex numbers in the complex number plane for every point. And for those where the series is diverging, you paint this black. And where it's converging, you don't. And you get the intermediate colors by taking how far it diverges.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So what we can identify as computer scientists, we can engineer systems and test our theories this way that may have the necessary insufficient properties to produce the phenomena that we are observing, which is there is a self in the virtual world. That is generated in somebody's neocortex that is contained in the skull of this primate here. And when I point at this, this indexicality is, of course, wrong, but I do create something that is likely to give rise to patterns on your retina that allow you to interpret what I'm saying, right? But we both know that the world that you and me are seeing is not the real physical world. What we are seeing is a virtual reality generated in your brain to explain the patterns on your retina.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, a brain cannot feel anything. A neuron cannot feel anything. They're physical things. Physical systems are unable to experience anything. But it would be very useful for the brain or for the organism to know what it would be like to be a person and to feel something. So, the brain creates a simulacrum of such a person that it uses to model the interactions of the person. It's the best model of what that brain, this organism thinks it is in relationship to its environment. So it creates that model. It's a story, a multimedia novel that the brain is continuously writing and updating.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are the result of these models. And in some sense, I don't think that we should understand, if you understand it properly, materialism and idealism is a dichotomy, but as two different aspects of the same thing. So the weird thing is we don't exist in the physical world. We do exist inside of a story that the brain tells itself.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is distinct from the physical world in which things have values only in an abstract sense. And you only look at cold patterns moving around. So how does anything feel like something and this connection between the two things is very puzzling to a lot of people and of course to many philosophers. So idealism starts out with the notion that mind is primary. Materialism thinks that matter is primary. And so for the idealist, the material patterns that we say playing out are part of the dream that the mind is dreaming. And we exist in a mind on a higher plane of existence, if you want. And for the materialist, there is only the”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what you notice is the only thing that is real to you and me is this experiential world in which things matter, in which things have taste, in which things have color, phenomenal content, and so on.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not quite. I think that most idealists don't have a notion of software yet, because software also comes down to information processing”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The computer is a generalization of information flowing around. Basically, what Turin discovered that there is the universal principle, you can define this universal machine that is able to perform all the computations. So all these machines have the same power. This means that you can always define a translation between them as long as they have unlimited memory to be able to perform each other's computations.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the idea of dualism in our cultural tradition is that there are two substances, a mental substance and a physical substance. And they interact by different rules. And the physical world is basically causally closed and is built on a low level causal structure. So they're basically a bottom level that is causally closed, that's entirely mechanical. And mechanical in the widest sense. So it's computational. There's basically a physical world in which information flows around. And physics describes the laws of how information flows around in this world.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The mental realm is real. And a lot of people have this intuition that there is this real room in which you and me talk and speak right now. Then comes a layer of physics and abstract rules and so on. And then comes another real room where our souls are. And our tool form isn't the thing that gives us phenomenal experience. And this is, of course, a very confused notion that you would get. And it's basically, it's the result of connecting materialism and idealism in the wrong way.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a real world in this real world is the world in which God exists. God is the coder of the multiplayer adventure, so to speak. We are all players in this game.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So basically you give everybody a spec, and the mathematical constraints that are intrinsic to information processing make sure that given the same spec, you come up with a compatible structure.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So basically, get this got online and to make it efficient and effective. And I think God technically is just a self that spends multiple brains as opposed to your and myself, which mostly exists just on one brain, right? And so in some sense, you can construct a self functionally as a function that is implemented by brains that Exists across brains. And this is a guide with a small”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the Catholics also introduced the notion of higher meaning, the sacred. And this existed before, but eventually the natural shape of God is the Platonic form of the civilization that you are part of. It's basically the superorganism that is formed by the individuals as an intentional agent. And basically, the Catholics used a relatively crude mythology to implement software on the minds of people and get the software synchronized to make them walk on lockstep.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source