Joscha Bach
speaker
510 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Aug 2023
last heard 23 Jan
Joscha Bach’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The idea that compression is sufficient to produce all the desired behaviors is a very radical idea.
It's something that wouldn't work in biological organisms, I believe. Biological organisms have something like next-frame prediction for our perceptual system, where we try to filter out principal components out of the perceptual data and build hierarchies over them to track the world.
But our behavior ultimately is directed by hundreds of physiological and probably dozens of social and a few cognitive needs. that are intrinsic to us, that are built into the system as reflexes and direct us until we can transcend them and replace them by instrumental behavior that relates to our higher goals.
Yes. Of course, there is not this degree of simultaneity in the biological system. But again, I don't know whether this is actually an optimization if we imitate biology here. Because creating something like simultaneity is necessary for many processes that happen in the brain.
And you see the outcome of that by synchronized brainwaves, which suggests that there is indeed synchronization going on, but the synchronization creates overhead. And this overhead is going to make the cells more expensive to run, and you need more redundancy, and it makes the system slower.
So if you can build a system in which the simultaneous need gets engineered into it, maybe you have a benefit that you can exploit that is not available to the biological system and that you should not discard right away.
I don't know if the language model is the right paradigm because it is doing too much. It's giving you too much. And it's hard once you have too much to take away from it again. The way in which our own mind works is not that we train a language model in our own mind and after the language model is there, we build a personal self on top of it that then relates to the world.
there is something that is being built, right? There is a game engine that is being built. There is a language of thought that is being developed that allows different parts of the mind to talk to each other. And this is a bit of a speculative hypothesis that this language of thought is there, but I suspect that it's important for the way in which our own minds work. And
Building these principles into a system might be a more straightforward way to a first-person AI. So to something that first creates an attentional self and then creates a personal self.
So the way in which this seems to be working, I think, is that when the game engine is built in your mind, it's not just following gradients where you are stimulated by the environment and then end up with having a solution to how the world works. I suspect that Building this game engine in your own mind does require intelligence. It's a constructive task where at times you need to reason.
And this is a task that we are fulfilling in the first years of our life. So during the first year of its life, an infant is building a lot of structure about the world that does inquire experiments and some first principles reasoning and so on. And in this time, there is usually no personal self. There is a first person perspective, but it's not a person.
This notion that you are a human being that is interacting in a social context and is confronted with an immutable world. in which objects are fixed and can no longer be changed, in which the dream can no longer be influenced, is something that emerges a little bit later in our life. And I personally suspect that this is something that our ancestors had known and we have forgotten.
Because I suspect that it's there in plain sight in Genesis 1, in this first book of the Bible, where it's being described that this creative spirit is hovering over the substrate, And then it's creating a boundary between the world model and sphere of ideas, earth and heaven, as they're being described there. And then it's creating contrast and then dimensions and then space.
And then it creates organic shapes and solids and liquids and builds a world from them and creates plants and animals, gives them all their names. And once that's done, it creates another spirit in its own image, but it creates it as man and woman, as something that thinks of itself as a human being and puts it into this world.
And the Christians mistranslate this, I suspect, when they say this is the description of the creation of the physical universe by a supernatural being. I think this is literally a description of how in every mind a universe is being created as some kind of game engine. by a creative spirit, our first consciousness that emerges in our mind even before we are born.
And that creates the interaction between organism and world. And once that is built and trained, the personal self is being created, and we only remember being the personal self. We no longer remember how we created the game engine.
And it's still there. You still have this outer mind that creates your sense of whether you're being loved by the world or not and what your place in the world is. It's something that is not yourself that is producing this. It's your mind that does it. So there is an outer mind that basically is an agent that determines who you are with respect to the world.
And while you are stuck being that personal self in this world until you get to stage six and you destroy the boundary. And we all do this, I think, earlier in small glimpses. And maybe sometimes we can remember what it was like when we were a small child and get some glimpses into how it's been. But for most people, that rarely happens.
The philosopher Thomas Metzinger is very concerned that the creation of superhuman intelligence would lead to superhuman suffering. And so he's strongly against it. And personally, I don't think that this happens because suffering is not happening at the boundary between... ourself and the physical universe. It's not some stuff on our skin that makes us suffer.
It happens at the boundary between self and world, right? And the world here is the world model. It's the stuff that is created by your mind. It's a representation of how the universe is and how it should be and how you yourself relate to this. And at this boundary is where suffering happens. So suffering in some sense is self-inflicted, but not by your personal self.
Showing 341–360 of 510 · page 18 of 26
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