Joscha Bach - AGI24 Keynote (Cyberanimism)

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Recorded21 Aug 2024

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Dr. Joscha Bach introduces a surprising idea called "cyber animism" in his AGI-24 talk - the notion that nature might be full of self-organizing software agents, similar to the spirits in ancient belief systems. Bach suggests that consciousness could be a kind of software running on our brains, and wonders if similar "programs" might exist in plants or even entire ecosystems. MLST is sponsored by Brave: The Brave Search API covers over 20 billion webpages, built from scratch without Big Tech biases or the recent extortionate price hikes on search API access. Perfect for AI model training and retrieval augmentated generation. Try it now - get 2,000 free queries monthly at http://brave.com/api. Joscha takes us on a tour de force through history, philosophy, and cutting-edge computer science, teasing us to rethink what we know about minds, machines, and the world around us. Joscha believes we should blur the lines between human, artificial, and natural intelligence, and argues that consciousness might be more widespread and interconnected than we ever thought possible. Dr. Joscha Bach https://x.com/Plinz This is video 2/9 from our coverage of AGI-24 in Seattle https://agi-conf.org/2024/ Watch the official MLST interview with Joscha which we did right after this talk on our Patreon now on early access - https://www.patreon.com/posts/joscha-bach-110199676 (you also get access to our private discord and biweekly calls) TOC: 00:00:00 Introduction: AGI and Cyberanimism 00:03:57 The Nature of Consciousness 00:08:46 Aristotle's Concepts of Mind and Consciousness 00:13:23 The Hard Problem of Consciousness 00:16:17 Functional Definition of Consciousness 00:20:24 Comparing LLMs and Human Consciousness 00:26:52 Testing for Consciousness in AI Systems 00:30:00 Animism and Software Agents in Nature 00:37:02 Plant Consciousness and Ecosystem Intelligence 00:40:36 The California Institute for Machine Consciousness 00:44:52 Ethics of Conscious AI and Suffering 00:46:29 Philosophical Perspectives on Consciousness 00:49:55 Q&A: Formalisms for Conscious Systems 00:53:27 Coherence, Self-Organization, and Compute Resources YT version (very high quality, filmed by us live) https://youtu.be/34VOI_oo-qM Refs: Aristotle's work on the soul and consciousness Richard Dawkins' work on genes and evolution Gerald Edelman's concept of Neural Darwinism Thomas Metzinger's book "Being No One" Yoshua Bengio's concept of the "consciousness prior" Stuart Hameroff's theories on microtubules and consciousness Christof Koch's work on consciousness Daniel Dennett's "Cartesian Theater" concept Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory Mike Levin's work on organismal intelligence The concept of animism in various cultures Freud's model of the mind Buddhist perspectives on consciousness and meditation The Genesis creation narrative (for its metaphorical interpretation) California Institute for Machine Consciousness

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