Joscha Bach

August 07, 2014

I recently discovered Joscha Bach ( a sample interview). He is a cognitive scientist with, in my opinion, a very insightful philosophy about the mind, ai and even society as a whole. I would highly encourage you to watch the linked video (or any of the others you can find on youtube), he is very good at expressing his thoughts and manages to be quite funny at the same time.

Nevertheless, the interviews all tend to be long and are anyway too unfocussed for discussion, let me summarize some of the things he said that stuck me as very insightful. It is entirely possible that some of what I am going to say is my misunderstanding of him, especially since his ideas are already at the very boundary of my understanding of the world.

• He defines intelligence as the ability of an agent to make models, sentience as the ability of an agent to conceptualize itself in the world and as distinct from the world and consciousness as the awareness of the contents of the agent's attention.
• In particular, consciousness arises from the need for an agent to update it's model of the world in reaction to new inputs and offers a way to focus attention on the parts of it's model that need updating. It's a side effect of the particular procedure humans use to tune their models of the world.
• Our sense of self is an illusion fostered by the brain because it's helpful for it to have a model of what a person (ie, the body in which the brain is hosted) will do. Since this model of the self in fact has some control over the body (but not complete control!), we tend to believe the illusion that the self indeed exists. This is nevertheless not true. Our perception of reality is only a narrative created by our brain to help it navigate the world and this is especially clear during times of stress - depression/anxiety etc but I think it's also clear in many other ways. For instance, the creative process is, I believe, something not in control of the narrative creating part of the brain. At least I find that ideas come to me out of the blue - I might (or might not) need to focus attention on some topic but the generation of new ideas is entirely due to my subconscious and the best I can do is rationalize later why I might have thought something.
• It's possible to identify our sense of self with things other than our body. People often do identify themselves with their children, their work etc. Even more ambitiously, this is the sense in which the Dalai Lama is truly reincarnated across generations. By training this kid in the phiolosphy of the Dalai Lama, they have ensured the continuation of this agent called the Dalai Lama that roughly has a continuous value system and goals over many centuries.
• Civilization as a whole can be viewed as an artificial intelligence that can be much smarter than any individual human in it. Humans used up a bunch of energy in the ground to kickstart the industrial revolution and support a vastly greater population than the norm before it, in the process leading to a great deal of innovation. This is however extremely unsustainable in the long run and we are coming close to the end of this period.
• Compounding this issue is the fact that our civilization has mostly lost the ability to think in the long term and undertake projects that take many people and/or many years. For a long time, religion gave everyone a shared purpose and at various points of time, there were other stand ins for this purpose. For instance, the founding of the United States was a grand project with many idealistic thinkers and projects, the cold war produced a lot of competetive research etc. We seem to have lost that in the modern day, for instance our response to the pandemic. He is quite unoptimistic about us being able to solve this crisis.
• In fact, you can even consider all of life to be one organism that has existed continuously for roughly 4 billion years. It's primary goal is to create complexity and it achieves this through evolution and natural selection.
• Another example of an organism/agent would be a modern corporation. They are sentient - they understand themselves as distinct entities and their relation to the wider world, they are intelligent - they create models of the world they exist in and I guess I am not sure if they are conscious. They are instantiated on the humans and computers/software that make up the corporation and their goals often change over time. For example, when Google was founded, it probably did have aspirational and altruistic goals and was succesful in realizing many of these goals (google books/scholar etc) but over time as it's leadership changed, it's primary purpose seems to have become a perpetuation of it's own existence. Advertising was initially only a way to achieve it's other goals but over time it seems to have taken over all of Google.
• On a personal note, he explains that there are two goals people might have in a conversation. Somewhat pithily, he refers to "nerds as people for whom the primary goal of conversation is to submit their thoughts to peer review while for most other people, the primary goal of conversation is to negotiate value alignment". I found this to be an excellent explanation for why I sometimes had trouble conversing with people and the various incentives different people might have.
• He has a very computational view of the world, physics and mathematics and as a mathematician, I found his thoughts quite interesting, especially his ideas on Wittgenstein, Godel and Turing but since this might not be interesting to many people, let me just leave a pointer.