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

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↗ youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM

Lex Fridman Podcast interview with Joscha Bach

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.

Notes

Quotes

  • 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.

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 kneed 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

Transcript

Timestamps

Several timestamps of particularly interesting ideas during the conversation.

  • 4:01 Nerd is someone who submits ideas to peer review when communicating. In contrast to negotiating alignment as typical people do.
  • 24:52 Intelligence is the ability to make models of patterns and see the structure of those patterns. Some models are general.
  • 25:35 Some of the problems are so general that a system that makes models needs to understand what itself is, how it relates to the environment. The cognitive system (you) have to model its own characteristics (attributes? personality traits?).
  • 27:39 Self-awareness and intelligence are not the same thing. Sentience / self awareness is an ability to make sense of the world and your place in it. In other words, it is possessing certain classes of models (models of yourself). Intelligence - ability to develop these models if you do not already have them. Conscious thought arises from a need to regulate surroundings that you are in. When I know something about myself is when I model it. Part of my brain models what the other part is doing.
  • 43:04 Category theory in mathematics - describing a set of fractals. First principle thinking: automata, number theory, spaces. Watch: Steven Wolfram cellular automata.
  • 44:52 We are side effects of the regulation needs of monkeys. Regulation concerns the relationship between an organism and its surroundings which often consists of other organisms.
  • 45:40 “Consciousness emerges over dimensions of disagreements with the universe” - understand consciousness as the conscious thought (in contrast to the conscious experience)(Lieberman, 2022)
  • 52:08 Dalai lama is governmental software running on a human being. What model do you identify yourself with?
  • 55:55 ‘Consciousness gives it colour, flavour’ - This is the conscious experience (in contrast to the conscious thought) (Lieberman, 2022)
  • 58:40 Attention to the attention itself. Again, such self-referential mechanisms that pay attention to the attention itself is conscious thought. The term consciousness is being used idiosyncratically, interchangeably as the conscious thought and the conscious experience.
  • 1:01:42 Space of concepts - Gardenfors would be handy here.
  • 1:03:00 Wittgenstein, Minsky, common-sense reasoning. However, no recognition of taxonomic (classes of objects) and thematic (mutual appearance of objects) semantics.
  • 1:07:00 Boltzman machines for building models. Networks which train Boltzman machines in a way that the number of constraints is not trivial. Possibility (vs. probability) of certain scenarios modelled as an effect of interaction of intentional agents?
  • 1:09:00 Meta learning. The 1st wave of AI was writing an algorithm which implements the solution for an identified problem (chess). The 2nd wave is writing an algorithm which writes algorithms which implements the solution for an identified problem (go). The 3rd wave will be meta-learning = find an algorithm that discovers a learning algorithm for a given domain. Referring to Lieberman again, is meta-learning the conscious thought influencing the conscious experience? In other words, can meta-learning be understood as an effect of interaction between the prefrontal structures (dlPFC, OFC, ACC) and the Gestalt Cortex? As a result, the conscious experience of a given situation is modulated (as in modulating attention around 2:03:00).
  • 1:23:05 We are intelligent over our timescale. From a perspective of trees or long-living ecosystems, we could be tools for releasing deposits of co2 back into the atmosphere.
  • 1:25:25 Lions building more complex models of their surroundings than antelopes do? In a sense that antelopes cannot go extinct if lions are about to survive.
  • 1:30:00 Closed cooling chains
  • 1:41:12 Communities not die, they evolve
  • 1:45:54 Frictionless governments
  • 1:51:43 As a civilization, we push random buttons without knowing what they connect to.
  • 1:57:14 Most people do not care about understanding themselves because they are adjusted well enough.
  • 2:00:56 You are a machine that thinks that’s you. It begs the question what is ‘you’. Is ‘you’ the one thinking or the one experiencing?
  • 2:03:21 Meditation is a bunch of techniques which allow you to control attention. You can change how your attention works (i.e. you can change your conscious experience). As a side note, experience (perception) is for action, possibilities of action (affordances) are being perceived.
  • 2:06:50 Dreaming systems that model constraints.
  • 2:38:21 You act on models of your needs, not on your needs.