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AI, Consciousness, Science, Art & Understanding – Joscha Bach

Here Joscha Bach discusses consciousness, it’s relationship to qualia and whether an AI or a utility maximizer would do with it.

What is consciousness? “I think under certain circumstances being conscious is an important part of a mind; it’s a model of a model of a model basically. What it means is our mind (our new cortex) produces this dream that we take to be the world based on the sensory data – so it’s basically a hallucination that predicts what next hits your retina – that’s the world. Out there, we don’t know what this is.. The universe is some kind of weird pattern generator with some quantum properties. And this pattern generator throws patterns at us, and we try to find regularity in them – and the hidden layers of this neural network amount to latent variables that are colors people sounds ideas and so on.. And this is the world that we subjectively inhabit – that’s the world that we find meaningful.”

… “I find theories [about consciousness] that make you feel good very suspicious. If there is something that is like my preferred outcome for emotional reasons, I should be realising that I have a confirmation bias towards this – and that truth is a very brutal vector”..

OUTLINE:
0:07 Consciousness and it’s importance
0:47 Phenomenal content
1:43 Consciousness and attention
2:30 When AI becomes conscious
2:57 Mary’s Room – the Knowledge Argument, art, science & understanding
4:07 What is understanding? What is truth?
4:49 What interests an artist? Art as a communicative exercise
5:48 Thomas Nagel: What is it like to be a bat?
6:19 Feel good theories
7:01 Raw feels or no? Why did nature endow us with raw feels?
8:29 What is qualia, and is it important?
9:49 Insight addiction & the aesthetics of information
10:52 Would a utility maximizer care about qualia?

BIO:
Principles of Synthetic Intelligence - Joscha BachJoscha 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) is available on amazon.

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