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

“The Catholic cars mostly And for better or worse, right? It has created or defined many of the modes of interaction that we have that has created this society. But it has also in some sense Scarred our rationality. And the intuition that exists if you would translate the mythology of the Catholic Church into the modern world is that the world in which you and me interact is something like a multiplayer role-playing adventure. And the money and the objects that we have in this world, this is all not real. As Eastern philosophers would say, it's Maya. It's just stuff that appears to be meaningful and this embedding in this meaning and if you believe in it is samsara. It's basically the identification with the needs of the mundane secular everyday existence.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the particular trajectory that mostly exists in the West is the result of our indoctrination by a cult for 2,000 years.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it has these properties that it can create certain patterns that our systemic interface to the world. And we make sense of these patterns and the relationship between the patterns that we discover is what we call the physical universe. So at some point in our development is a nervous system, we discover that everything that we relate to in the world can be mapped to a region in the same three-dimensional space by and large. We now know in physics that this is not quite true. Well, this is not actually three-dimensional, but the world that we are entangled with at the level which we are entangled with is largely a flat three-dimensional space. And so this is the model that our brain is intuitively making. And this is, I think, what gave rise to this intuition of RES extensor, of this material world, this material domain. It's one of the mental domains, but it's just the class of all models that relate to this environment, this three-dimensional physics engine in which we are embedded.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two aspects to this question. One is the representation, is the representation adequate for the domain that we want to represent. And the other one is the type of model that you arrive at adequate. So basically are you modeling the correct domain? And I think in both of these cases, modern AI is lacking still. And I think that I'm not saying anything new here. I'm not criticizing the field. Most of the people that design our paradigms are aware of that. And so one aspect that we are missing is unified learning. When we learn, at some point discover that everything that we sense is part of the same object, which means we learn it all into one model.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I call this ability to make sense of the world and your own place in it. So make you able to understand what you're doing in this world sentience. And I would distinguish sentience from intelligence because sentience is... Possessing certain classes of models. And intelligence is a way to get to these models if you don't already have them.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“find that many highly intelligent people are not very self aware, right? So self-awareness and intelligence are not the same thing. And you can also be self-aware if you have good priors especially without being especially intelligent. So, you don't need to be very good at solving puzzles if the system that you are already implements the solution.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a test on us Turing test is basically a test of the conjecture whether people are intelligent enough to understand themselves.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intelligent because in order to take this test, the rep is of course you need to be able to understand what that system is saying. And we don't yet know if we can build an AI. We don't yet know if we are generally intelligent. Basically you win the Turing test by building an AI.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're perceiving yourself as wanting different things, so you become aware of your own psychology You become aware of the fact that you have complex structure in yourself and you need to model yourself to reverse engineer yourself to be able to predict how you will react to certain situations and how you deal with yourself in relationship to your environment. And this process, this project, if you reverse engineer yourself and your relationship to reality and the nature of a universe that can continue, if you go all the way, this is basically the project of AI, or you could say the project of AI is a very important component in it. The tutoring test in a way is you ask a system what is intelligence. If that system is able to explain what it is, how it works, then you should assign it the property of being intelligent in this general sense. So the test that Turing was administering in a way, I don't think that he couldn't see it, but he didn't express it yet in the original 1950 paper, is that he was trying to find out whether he was generally interested.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I suspect that general intelligence is the result of trying to solve general problems. So intelligence, I think, is the ability to model. It's not necessarily goal-directed rationality or something. Many intelligent people are bad at this. But it's the ability to be presented with a number of patterns and see a structure in those patterns and be able to predict the next set of patterns to make sense of things. And some problems are very general. Usually intelligence serves control. So you make these models for a particular purpose of interacting as an agent with the world and getting certain results. But the intelligence itself is in the sense instrumental to something. But by itself, it's just the ability to make models. And some of the problems are so general that the system that makes them needs to understand what itself is and how it relates to the environment. So as a child, for instance, you notice you do certain things despite”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that you can see AI largely today as Advanced information processing. If you would change the acronym of AI into that, most people in the field would be happy. It would not change anything what they're doing. By automating statistics and many of the statistical models are more advanced than what statisticians had in the past. And it's pretty good work. It's very productive. And the other aspect of AI is philosophical project. And this philosophical project is very risky. And very few people work on it and it's not clear if it succeeds.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lead to strong AI. Why should I be doing it? I will just wait until they're done and wait until they do this on the beach or read interesting books or write some and have fun. But if you don't think that we are currently doing the right thing, if we are missing some perspectives, then it's required to think outside of the box. It also required to understand the boxes. It's necessary to understand what worked and what didn't work and for what reasons. So you have to be willing to ask new questions and design new methods whenever you want to answer them. And you have to be willing to dismiss the existing methods if you think that they're not going to yield the right answers. It's very bad career advice to do that.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And privileged enough to join the right team, and then their name will show up on influential papers. But we also see that there are diminishing returns with this approach. And when our field, computer science and AI started, most of the people that joined this field had interesting opinions. And today's thinkers in AI either don't have interesting opinions at all, or these opinions are inconsequential for what they're actually doing. Because what they're doing is they apply the state-of-the-art methods with a small epsilon. And this is often a good idea if you think that this is the best way to make progress. And for me, it's first of all very boring if somebody else can do it, why should I do it? If the current methods of machine learning”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a big danger in this because, in a way, you are expected to marry into an intellectual tradition. And within this tradition into a particular school, if everybody comes up with their own paradigms, the whole thing is not cumulative as an enterprise, right? So, in some sense, you need a healthy balance, you need paradigmatic thinkers, and you need people that work within given paradigms. Basically, sciences today define themselves largely by methods. And it's almost a disease that we think is a scientist, somebody who was convinced by their guidance counselor that they should join a particular discipline and then they find a good mentor to learn the right methods. And then they are lucky enough.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly not me, I think. Mostly it's still this child that Growth up in a very beautiful valley and looks at the world from the outside and tries to understand what's going on. And my teachers tell me things and they largely don't make sense. So I have to make my own model. So I have to discover the foundations of what the others are saying. I have to try to fix them, to be charitable. I try to understand what they must have thought originally or what their teachers or their teachers teachers must have thought until everything got lost in translation and how to make sense of the reality that we are in. And whenever I have an original idea, I'm usually late to the party by say 400 years. And the only thing that's good is that the parties get smaller and smaller the older I get and the more I explore.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it looks complicated to people, but it's far less complicated than what our brain is casually doing all the time when it makes sense of reality. And philosophy is coming from the top. So it's mostly starting from natural languages with vaguely defined concepts. And the hope is that mathematics and philosophy can meet at some point. And Wittgenstein was trying to make them meet. And he already understood that, for instance, you could express everything with the Nand calculus, that you could reduce the entire logic to Nandgates, as we do in our modern computers. So in some sense, you already understood Turing universality before Turing spelled it out. I think when he wrote the Tractatus, he didn't understand yet that the idea was so important and significant. And I suspect when Turing wrote it out, nobody cared that much. Turing was not that famous when he lived. It was mostly his work in decrypting the German codes that made him famous or gave him some notoriety. But this saint status that he has to computer science right now and AI is something that I think he acquired later.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Wittgenstein even canceled some classes when Turing was not present because he thought it was not worth spending the time on the other side. If you read the attractos, it's a very beautiful book. They say one thought on 75 pages. It's very non-typical for philosophy because it doesn't have arguments in it and it doesn't have references in it. It's just one thought that is not intending to convince anybody. He says it's mostly for people that have the same insight as me. Just spell it out. And this insight is there is a way in which mathematics and philosophy ought to meet. Mathematics tries to understand the domain of all languages by starting with those that are so formalizable that you can prove all the properties of the statements that you make. But the price that you pay is that your language is very, very simple. So it's very hard to say something meaningful in mathematics.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Wittgenstein could see it, and Wittgenstein basically preempted the Logitus program of AI that Minsky started later, like 30 years later. Turing was actually a pupil of Wittgenstein.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Means there are parts of physics that are defined in such a way that cannot strictly be true because assuming that this could be true deeds into contradictions.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And for Turing, it wasn't quite so bad. I think that Turing could see that the solution is to understand that mathematics was computation all along, which means you, for instance, pi in classical mathematics is a value. Also, a function, but it's the same thing. And 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 sign, 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”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, Get a Hilbert saw that, for instance, a country set theoretic experiments in mathematics led into contradictions, and he noticed that with the current semantics, we cannot build a computer in mathematics that runs mathematics without crashing. And Goodel could prove this. And so what Goodel could show is using classical mathematical semantics, you run into contradictions. And because Girdle strongly believed in these semantics and more than in what he could observe and so on, he was shocked. It basically shook his world to the core because in some sense he felt that the world has to be implemented in classical mathematics.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's also this thing that, in some sense, the low hanging fruits in philosophy were mostly wrapped. And the last big things that we discovered was the constructivist turn in mathematics. So to understand that the parts of mathematics that work are computation, that was very significant discovery in the first half of the 20th century. And it hasn't fully permeated philosophy and even physics yet. Physicists checked out the code libraries for mathematics before constructivism became universal.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so we asked ourselves when did classical philosophy end? I think for Germany it largely ended with the first revolution. That's basically when we... This was when we entered the monarchy and started a democracy. And at this point, we basically came up with a new form of government that didn't have a good sense of this new organism that society wanted to be. And in a way, it decapitated the universities. So the universities went on through modernism like a headless chicken. At the same time, democracy failed in Germany and we got fascism as a result. And it burned down things in a similar way as Stalinism burned down intellectual traditions in Russia. And Germany, both Germanies, have not recovered from this. Eastern Germany had this vulgar dialectic materialism, and Western Germany didn't get much more edgy than Habermas. In some sense, both countries lost their intellectual traditions and killing off and driving out the Jews didn't help.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“May not have a why. This might be the wrong direction to ask into this. So there could be no. relation in the y direction without asking for a purpose or for a cause. It doesn't mean that everything has to have a purpose or a cause, right?”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine that every automaton is basically an operator. Acts on some substrate. And as a result, you get emergent patterns No idea to know. So it's basically”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Non existence might not be a meaningful notion in the sense. So, in some sense, if everything that can exist exists for something to exist, it probably needs to be implementable. The only thing that can be implemented is finite automata. So maybe the whole of existence is the superposition of all finite automata. And we are in some region of the fractal that has the properties that it can contain us.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The easiest answer is existence is the default, right? So, this is the lowest number of bits that you would need to encode this.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than nothing. And this seems to be true, right? There's an absolute truth in the fact that something seems to be happening.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You cannot define objective truth without understanding the nature of truths in the first place. So what does a brain mean by saying that discover something is truth? So for instance, a model can be predictive or not predictive, then there can be a sense in which a mathematical statement can be true because it's defined as true under certain conditions. So it's basically a particular state that a variable can have in a symboled game. And then you can have a correspondence between systems and talk about truth, which is again a type of model correspondence. And there also seems to be a particular kind of ground truth. So for instance, we are confronted with the enormity of something existing at all, right? That's stunning when you realize something exists.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that you are neither serious or not serious yourself because you need to become unimportant as a subject that is. If you are a philosopher, believe is not a verb. You don't do this for the audience, you don't do it for yourself. You have to submit to the things that are possibly true and you have to follow wherever your inquiry leads, but it's not about you. It has nothing to do with you.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You find the same thing in Hesser and so on. This step involves syndrome is classic adolescent, where you basically 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 a prototypical human and the others around you should behave the same way as you expect them based on your innate instincts and it doesn't work out and you become a transcendentalist to deal with that. So it's very, very understandable and 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.”
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 lack of self-awareness. 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.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very easy to read, and yeah, but he's not so much trolling others, he's trolling himself because he was at odds with the world. Largely his romantic relationships didn't work out. He got angry and he basically became a nihilist.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, read everything, so I went to the library and I worked my way through the children's and young adult sections and then I read a lot of science fiction, for instance Danislav Lem, basically the great author of cybernetics, has influenced me. Back then, I didn't see him as a big influence because everything that he wrote seemed to be so natural to me. It's only later that I contrasted it with what other people wrote. Another thing that was very influential on me were the classical philosophers and also the literature of Romanticism, so German poetry and Roster Hilzhof and Heine and Abtu Hesser and so on.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was not a real way for me to relate to the outside world. And I couldn't quite put my finger on why. And today I know it was because I was a nerd, obviously, and I was the only nerd. So there was no other kids like me, and there was nobody interested in physics or computing or mathematics and so on. And this village school that I went to was basically a nice school. Kids were nice to me. I was not beaten up, but I also didn't make many friends. Deep relationships that only happen in starting from ninth grade when I went into a school for mathematics and physics.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was actually not a thinker, he was somebody who only got self-aware to the degree that he needed to make himself functional. So in some sense he was also late 1960s and he was in some sense a hippie. So he became a one-person cult. He lived out there in his kingdom. He built big sculpture gardens and started many avenues of art and so on and convinced women to live with him. She was also an architect and she adored him and decided to share her life with him. And I basically grew up in a big cave full of books. I'm almost farewell and I was bored out there. It was very, very beautiful, very quiet, and quite lonely. So I started to read. And by the time I came to school, I've read everything until fourth grade and then some.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And the other thing is it was almost impossible not to be in political disagreement with your government, which is very productive for artists. So everything that you do is intrinsically meaningful because it will always touch on the deeper currents of society, of culture and being in conflict with it and tension with it. And you will always have to define yourself with respect to this.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had complete material safety was heavily subsidized healthcare was free, you didn't have to worry about rent or pensions or anything.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He didn't study architecture But basically, my grandfather made the wrong decision. He married an aristocrat and was drawn into the war. And he came back after 15 years. So basically my father was not parented by inert, but by somebody who tried to tell him what to do and expected him to do what he was told. And he was unable to. He's unable to do things if he's not intrinsically motivated. So in some sense, my grandmother broke her son and her son responded by when he became an architect to become an artist. So he built Hunda Advasar architecture. He built houses without right angles. He bought an old watermill, moved out to the countryside, and did only what he wanted to do, which was art. Eastern Germany was perfect for Bohem because you”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who you consider to be a peer. So whatever hapless individual is around, well, you would try to make him or her the gift of information.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father came from a long tradition of architects, distant branch of the Bach family. And so basically he was technically inert. And nerds need to interface in society with non-standard ways. Sometimes I define a nerd as somebody who thinks that the purpose of communication is to submit your ideas to peer review. And normal people understand that the primary purpose of communication is to negotiate alignment. And these purposes tend to conflict, which means that nerds have to learn how to interact with society at large.”
2020-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source