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Good morning, dear fellow conscious
beings, and
good day to you, fellow human beings
in front of the displays at home.
I would like to talk about four basic
questions, actually,
probably I'm not able to answer them
completely today because they're
sort of the first questions that we have
might not be quite true.
I think the first questions that we had
as humanity was where is the
food? And then how
can we push back and to be far enough to
get warm and to get the dirt of us.
And then once that was solved, where
can we find love?
Because love is important.
And when this was solved, these questions
remained.
That is what's the nature of reality?
What does the universe look like?
What's the state of affairs out there?
And then what can we know about it?
What's accessible to us?
Who are we, what our minds
and what should we do?
Philosophy hasn't found final answers to
these four questions, but it has asked
them very nicely, and I think that if
you want to turn to answers, we should
look into individual scientists.
And I looked into computer science
mostly for the last 23
years or so.
And I would like to focus on a particular
small subquestion, and that is the
question of how it is
possible that the mind experiences
a universe and make sense of it.
How is it possible that signals enter
our mind somehow and are
assessed by arrays of finely
tuned classifiers that
react to them and then create
dynamic representations of objects and
things and give rise to desires
and needs and wishes?
And then this whole thing triggers
associations in our memory, in our mind,
and this all gets into great
it, into a coherent experience of
awareness that spreads out and
stabilizes throughout our mind.
And then this gives rise to new memories
and imaginations and goals and plans
and expectations, and then
it feeds back into the world somehow.
How is that possible?
I think this is basically the most
interesting question of all.
Reality is not given directly to us.
The only thing that we get from it is
appearances or
as said, more than 100 years
ago. You get phenomena
and somehow our mind is able to turn
these phenomena into ideas and concepts
that also called Nguema and the process
by which it does. It is what you call it,
Noisette.
We cannot really say much about
the state of affairs out there beyond the
fact that it's able to yield phenomena
appearances.
And because we cannot say anything
definite about their how the structure
of the universe really looks like was
said. You shouldn't say anything about
this. We should just shut up about it.
And he calls this if hookey.
So far, so good. But then his pupils came
along and then they try to apply
this idea of Noyce's upon
Wasis itself and they realized if you try
to explain wasis or we end up this
is Nyumah again, it's
all the explanations that we possibly get
about the state of affairs, our part
of our new ethics, fear.
They're just ideas and concepts.
So to formulate them, we
already need to presuppose Noyce's
science cannot reduce noise itself,
Maxilla said, and therefore it must
presuppose the existence of the subject
in the first place.
This has given rise to Continental
philosophy and eventually to
this division of most of philosophy in
the sciences that we experience
throughout most of the last century,
which I think is very unfortunate.
But there might be a way out of this.
If you look upon
the idea of how a robot perceives the
world, it has an interface
to the environment and this interface
phase might be a bunch of sensors and
sensors yield a vector of bets
that is discernible differences,
patterns. That is the same boundary that
might be used to reduce uncertainty.
And these bits are encoded
into some low level encodings.
And then you might have a cognitive
architecture implemented in the robot
processing that turns this into
a conceptual representations that allow
the robot to reason about the world and
to tell itself a story about what
the world looks like and what itself
looks like in that world.
But of course, to a robot, there are no
phenomena. It's nothing what it feels
like to be in this world, what the
appearances are and so on to the robot.
There are only bits at the interface to
the world.
But perhaps it's possible to build
a cognitive architecture in a robot
that is able to encode these bits
at a specific interface into something
that looks like percepts
to the robot, that looks like phenomena
to the robot, and that gives rise
to concepts in a very similar way
as noises that and humans object.
The phenomena in this way might result
from the robot's information processing
architecture.
And if you buy into this paradigm, of
course, we might ask ourselves if humans
are robots to.
And this idea that humans are actually
information processing machines is
what underlies most of the cognitive
sciences, whether they're aware of
this or not.
How do we perceive reality?
You probably know this well-known
picture. I think I turned it upside down.
OK.
There's something odd with this picture
going on. Yeah, this is the normal
version. The thing that was odd about it
in the first place was that the eyes and
the mouth have been turned around and
maybe some of you didn't notice at first.
Why is that the case?
And I think that's because we don't
process and take in faces
as a whole, but rather the process
features in the face independently
and then we combine them into a face
schema that we mentally scan.
If you look about visual information
processing, first of all, we have
a retina and this retinal gives us a
vector of bits, that is
information patterns that are systemic
boundary that reduce uncertainty that we
can encode to form
concepts about the world.
Data on the retina is not a very good
semblance of what
what's out there in the world or
whatever. Is a very sharp spot
in the middle that is hard enough to
read. It's pretty small then there's
a lot of mushiness around color vision.
It's only there in the center there is a
blind spot in which the optic
nerve connects to the retina and where we
have no photoreceptors.
But we don't see any of this.
Of course, this data
is first projected into what
neuroscientists call the letter read to
Nicolet Nucleus, which is a fancy
that is letton way of saying that is
somehow a sideways knee like
looking protrusion protruding
core. It's in the center of the brain
and it's part of the thalamus and the
thalamus determines chamber and it's sits
conveniently on top of the spinal cord
and it relays a lot of sensory data
into the cortex. So you have
a crude touch and temperature and pain
and so on. This all gets transmitted by
the thalamus into the cortex.
You can think of it like a switchboard.
And this switchboard put projects
information into the primary
visual area, the straight cortex.
And this thing, if you look at a cross
section of it, is basically two
millimeters of highly packed
neurons on top of lots and lots
of wiring
in the brain, there is something like
180000 kilometers of wiring
depending on your age and gender.
This varies a bit.
And on top of this wiring
and the cortex, you have these two
millimeters of neurons
that are organized in columns
and in the visual cortex.
These columns have the highest density of
neurons, which is probably because
graphics is so expensive to compute.
And right now, most neuroscientists
believe that the primary
organizational unit of these neurons is
the mini column, a mini column is
something like a circuit that is made up
of something like 200 to 400 neurons.
Half of that and the rest of the cortex.
So if you do the math, there are about
160000 million neurons
in the primary visual cortex.
You get about something like 300000
features that can be encoded and
the primary visual cortex.
And if you look into this,
we do measurements in the brain there.
You find that in the middle there
is an expanded area because there are
more features detected in the middle
and it gets compressed around the
corners. There's even the blind spot
somewhere in there.
And the different ones in this spatial
alignment, they call called for
orientation and for frequency
and for color.
The primary visual area, we everyone then
projects into V2, which has a stable
visual map, so all the movements of the
retina are combined and something
like a coherent visual field is
somewhat stable.
Also has more complex patterns and
textures, it also projects into three
and indeed free and visual areas
where we have color and some motion
direction and into
V4, very simple geometric shapes
before we have mostly looked at in
non-human primates.
People probably have an equivalent to
that.
It also these areas
project into five, which
has object motion and eagle
motion in vehicles, and you can see
that now this processing power split
up and we found that there are two
primary directions of processing
in the brain that work in parallel.
One is what path?
It's down there in the brain.
And it tells you about the nature of
objects and the verifies, which tells you
where they are. And the purpose reaches
into those areas of the brain that are
then responsible for grasping
and attending to objects and their
positions.
This area that encodes
for the what of objects is what we
call the inferior temporal gyrus,
which again is Latin for the
lower side baseballs
and this lower side baseball
object schemata and enables us to
separate figures from ground and also has
numerous Rosatti. That is the ability to
discern numbers which without actually
counting. So if we look at,
for instance, the side of a dice and vis
a vis a single look how many dots
there are on this side of the dice, this
is normal, Rosatti, and it's done in the
inferior temporal gyrus.
And there's an area in the inferior
temporal GI, which is called the fusiform
drivers. The spindle, like rich in the
spindle leg, which is responsible for
face recognition.
If that is not working in your brain or
you don't have it, you have
prosopagnosia.
That is, you don't recognize human
faces and emotions and so on very well.
And you have difficulty to discern people
by their faces surprisingly common.
Then there is an area in the brain that
is able to direct attention, and
this is the dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex. It's somewhere in the forebrain.
And you can think of it as an area that
helps a lot of pointers and the rest of
the cortex. And using these pointers,
it can pump activation in there and
create a coherent pattern of activation.
It directs our attention and
scans the schemata.
For instance, if you have a face or a
presentation or this representation of
the Mona Lisa, it can scan down
from the face level to the eye level
and so on into the mouse level to certain
features there.
The great thing about a model like this
is that we can actually turn it into a
specification for a computer program
and then we can implement this and test
whether our theory about how the mind
works, all these observations that we
have taken from neuroscience and from
hard engineering, like thinking if you
are in nature, how would you do this?
If you can turn this into a coherent
model and then we can test this model and
see that it actually is able to perform
pretty good vision.
Of course, this is a simplification and a
lot of the details are missing, but
it can do most of the tricks that you
want it to show. So I think that we are
pretty much on the right path here.
So what types of representations do we
have, you have schematic representations,
this thing that distinguishes between
faces and bodies and
eyes and so on,
and then we have non-competition
representations.
Those that we cannot combine, we cannot
reuse the features throughout the
representation. This is more associative
and vague and so on.
And it's hard to turn this
into language.
We have these language representations
that enable us to organize our schemas
on a high level and to communicate them
to others.
And then we have a class of
representations that I would call
generative, and these generators
allow us to build simulations
of the world dynamic simulations.
So, for instance, if you think about
music or sound, what we need is
something like a synthesizer in our mind.
For instance, here an artist has made
a representation of what
the sound of a canary would look like if
you take it from the visual into
the visual domain, like synesthesia.
And I think this looks a lot like
synesthesia if you ever had an
synesthetic experience.
So in a way, I think this is
an equivalent of what the brain does to
model. Sounds like this.
And imagine sounds like this.
Somewhere in the brain, a computational
structure must be built that looks a lot
like this.
And it's not a schema.
It's not just a static
neural pattern, but rather it's a
generator.
The difference between a perceptual
representation and an idea is that the
perceptual representation is tagged
as being verified
in somewhere in the sensory area,
so it gets projected down as a hypothesis
into the sensory areas of the brain
and the nervous system and then can get a
verification. And when it's labeled as
verified, our brain
takes this as being real by the rest of
us being in an idea.
So if we try to generalize this,
you have the dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex that somehow exercice distributed
hierarchical representations
and these hierarchies of distributive
representations are picked out by the
attentional selection.
Usually most of the time there is a
superposition of many alternative
interpretations and it's
very hard to translate this into
language.
But using the dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex, if you can make this coalesce
into a coherent representation,
imagine you have superimposed images,
superimposed photography that have
different layers projected onto the same
image. You are still able to discern the
different layers.
And this is because we can direct our
attention onto a part of the
representation and then make it
coherent by suppressing those parts that
are not compatible with it.
And this intentional filtering
is orchestrated apparently by the
dorsolateral frontal cortex.
And this bottom up, top down perception
extends down into the sensory
perceptual areas that if you get
predictive attention and motor control,
that enables us to pick us stimuli
from the environment to verify our
hypothesis, what's actually being the
case. And then as a result, we get back
filtered representations that form
these intermediate stage.
Not all of our representations have a
sense of grounding, of course, our modern
model and ourselves model have some sense
of grounding in proprioception,
for instance, or in visual perception.
But our mental state, so we can freely
manipulate ideas, does not.
And our memories, of course, don't have
anymore.
You could also see memory, by the way,
as something like
visual perception, whereas something like
a perceptual process.
But you ask the memory what hypothesis
are true and as a result you get big
object abstractions and episodic
episodes that happened in the past and
procedural memory, which tells you how to
do things and templates,
frames that allow us to
interpret the current situation.
The sensory perception basically is an
interface to the universe.
It's give the universe, gives us your
bits and we use those bits, encode them
into the mental state, into the word
model s model and so on.
And the level of attention, awareness,
we're able to perform symbolic
operations. That is, you can do
conceptual thinking based on these
representations by manipulating them
in dreams. Something interesting happens
because we don't have access to
our sensory organs anymore.
And what would normally be the output
of those lower level sensory areas gets
replaced by pretty much random noise.
And this random noise then is encoded
in the same way as the sensory data was
encoded before.
So we get something that looks like a
model and a self model, but it looks
pretty weird.
Thankfully, our long term memory
formation is turned off during that time,
too, so usually we don't remember this,
it actually might be useful process.
Maybe some things are getting
strengthened. You find US associations
and so on, and some housekeeping is being
done on the mental representations.
So the purpose of dreams is not
completely explored and fully known.
But I think the nature of dreams is
caused by the fact that the lowest level
is replaced by random noise.
If we do meditation, you can
completely tune out this interface to the
universe if we want to, we also can turn
out the framing of mental representations
in terms of the templates that we have
acquired in the past.
So we get more awareness of
what's actually the case.
And if you go very, very deep into
meditation, you can even turn off
the model of self.
How is it possible that you can be
conscious without yourself?
I think that's because our self is
not identical to our mind.
Our self is also not an agent.
Ourself is a representation.
It's a story that the mind tells
itself about what happens with
it in the world.
And we need this story to do high
level learning on what
we do in the world, because, for
instance, if you play ping pong, the need
to react very, very quickly in the
course of a few, ten or
a hundred milliseconds.
And this doesn't leave enough time for
cortical processing.
But there's reflex arc is unable to
determine whether we've just won a match
to decide whether we want to match of
ping pong and use this as reinforcement
learning to improve our moves.
We need to have this high level of story
and this high level story is what we
perceive as the self.
Likewise, Will is not what drives our
decision making, but whether the will is
a representation on the level of the
South, it's a representation of the fact
that somewhere in the mind, a motive
has been raised to an intention that
we have committed to do something.
And free will is actually a social
notion. It means that this decision
could have been influenced by discourse,
by cognitive thought, by conscious
thought and by talking to other people.
So freewill is actually a social notion.
It's determines whether we can
be made socially responsible,
discursively responsible for our actions.
So what's consciousness then, is it a
behavior it's tempting to say, because,
for instance, if you have this test, it's
quite famous.
If consciousness, for instance, the
ability to recognize yourself in the
mirror. This is observable behavior.
Psychologists love observable behavior.
So they took a lot of animals
and humans and put masks on their faces
and put them in front of a mirror.
And then they test whether they able to
recognize themselves in the mirror and
thereby prove that they have a concept of
self and consciousness.
Difficulty there is that it's actually
not a test of consciousness, but it's a
test of your ability to recognize that
the mirror shows your body surface test
that I might feel on a bad day
and.
Then we laid between that mirror image
and your body and then
be able to care about this
for a long time, people
thought that elephants don't
have a concept of self because they don't
remove the marks on their faces before
people realize that elephants usually
don't care about marks on their faces.
That is about two out of three elements.
Elephants don't care.
Also, dogs failed this test and maybe
dogs failed this test because they
recognized each other, mostly by smell
and by hearing it.
Not so much variation.
So this is not a really good test for
consciousness.
And because it's neither necessary
nor sufficient for consciousness to be
able to recognize yourself in the mirror,
maybe it's something else entirely.
Maybe it's the awareness of what happens
in our mind.
I think it's a pretty good idea that John
Lochhead but, you
know, we don't really
get much awareness of what actually
happens in our mind. For instance, this
continuity of experience is fake.
If you look at these small eye movements,
the Skate's, they're very small and
jerky. And during this small and jerky
movements, the world doesn't jerk around.
How does this work?
It works because our brain blancs,
our vision during those movements.
It also blinks our vision during blinking
most of the time so the world doesn't
turn black and bright again.
And yet few receive perceive this
as a continuous stream of experience, so
somehow this story
of this continuous experience that I have
with you, this visual experience is a
fake. It's being stitched up
into a coherent experience.
Then came Julio Tanon, who suggested
that consciousness is something else
entirely. It's something that
is emergent over the integration of
information in your brain.
Julio Tanana is a neuroscientist and
he has suggested that if
representations are very disconnected in
your mind, then we are not conscious.
And if they start to form a coherent
image, they start being somewhat
minimally conscious.
And if almost all of the cortex is
recruited for a coherent representation,
then we are fully conscious.
The beauty of this is that we can
actually measure this and we can come up
with information theoretic measures which
you qualify.
And FYI somehow stands for
a degree of consciousness that a system
can have a drawback of.
The theory is that we can build a very
trivial a computer program that has a
very, very high and is obviously not
conscious.
So I think it's a good idea
if you look for consciousness, to look
for large, coherent representations,
so somehow that's necessary,
but it's certainly not sufficient.
I don't think it's a very good idea, but
it's a much better idea than earlier
neuroscientists had, like Bofinger
Singer, who suggested that consciousness
is a 40 hertz oscillation in the brain.
I think neuroscience is really coming
along here.
I think that consciousness is actually a
set of functions.
It's a suitcase term that stands
for a bunch of very different mechanisms.
And these mechanisms are qualitative.
They need to be present.
If these mechanisms are missing, they're
not conscious.
So it's not just emergent in some magical
way, but rather it's a bunch of
things that the brain needs to do.
And, for instance, it needs to create a
local perceptual space and the
experience of where we currently are.
We need to have access to perceptual
content. We need to have the current role
model, which also includes the things
that are not currently looking at.
We have to have some directed attention
and this attention can either be focused
or wired or it can be inward,
already directed, but it needs to be
there and we need to have access
to our concepts and simulations
and linguistic content and so on.
And the mind should be able to follow
along on connections that it has.
So we have this stream of consciousness
and we need an ability to create new
concepts and to manipulate them.
If we need to be able to put them onto
onto a mental stage and observe them on
that mental stage.
These features are missing.
I think we are not conscious.
We need to have these features.
Of course, they are different states of
consciousness and these different states
of consciousness have different
functionality.
For instance, during dreaming, we don't
have access to our outer perceptual
data. We don't have access to our motor
functions.
We don't have access to agencies.
So we cannot control what we do in dreams
except in lucid dreams.
And lucid dreams are somehow an
intermediate stage.
You get additional functionality that
bootstraps our agencies so we can have
goals and plans and reflect upon what we
do to some extent.
But you still don't have access to our
bodily experiences and we don't have
access to our muscles except maybe the
eye muscles.
And so we move around in
our own minds in cyberspace during a
lucid dream.
And of course, we are conscious in that
state.
Then we have a bunch of competencies that
are nice to have things like the ability
to learn from experience or the ability
to create intentional models of other
agents, or the ability to create
mechanical objects of processes in the
world and so on.
If these things are missing because you
have a neurodegenerative disease or
because you are a very small child, you
are still conscious.
But you could argue that you are
conscious to a lesser degree.
Then there is meditation and meditation.
You tune out some of your abilities and
you get access to new functional
mechanisms and you can learn, for
instance, to control voluntarily
some parameters of your physiology,
of your cognition that would normally not
be accessible.
And then, of course, there are the
altered states of mind, for instance,
states of psychosis or of
psychedelic states in which you also have
access to different mechanisms and lose
access to others.
So in the middle, we have this whole
consciousness and we have a bunch of
functionality that may or may not be
present.
And consciousness in this sense is
a really big set of functions,
and it's similar to love.
Love is also a set of overlapping states
that are giving rise to by different
mechanisms, for instance, in need of
closeness or a need for affiliation
or a need for caring for others
and all these together from
this big compound that we call love.
But it's actually a set of very different
mechanisms.
Love is important.
So in my perspective,
the mind is an information processing
system to perform all this information
processing, what we need to have is
computation. We need to have some
substrate that gives computation to
the mind. And currently, we tend to
believe that this computational substrate
is mostly the brain with its
neurons.
But how can we account for the regularity
of the patterns that the universe throws
at us? How is that possible?
What can we say about the universe?
Apparently these patterns that we have at
our systemic interface are quite regular.
That's why we can encode them so
successfully until concepts and things
like time and space and so on.
To produce these regularities and
patterns the universe needs
to compute to.
This is the only thing that we can say
with some certainty, it's necessary
and sufficient to produce regularities
and patterns that you can compute.
You can define computing
and very abstract ways, so one
way of computing a universe would be that
if you have a machine
could call this machine that computes the
universe in honor of
Google, for instance.
Good. And this machine good,
that has a set of possible instructions
and it has a current instructional time
and it has a current state of the
universe, which is a vector of bits.
It's very many, many, many minutes.
And these many, many bits are basically
small, discernible differences.
Small, yes. And no's.
And then we need a position, a list of a
single bit in the universe that we're
currently working with.
And each instruction
has this format that it takes a bit
at this position.
And depending on the value of that bit,
whether it's zero or one or yes and no,
we write in a new bit at this
position. And then we advanced one
position to the right or one position to
the left, and then we pick a new current
instruction and that's it.
With this, we can define the Turing
machine and there are many other
ways to define computation.
For instance, we could use multiple bits
at each position and we can write or
read more than one position with one
instruction or the transitions
between the instructions that is between
the different states of good.
They could be probabilistic
or we could have one good
at every position of the universe
and not move them at all, but
rather have them be static and read
the positions of the neighbors, the data
from the neighbors.
In this case, we define a cellular
automaton and all these different
approaches to computation
can do the same stuff.
Some of them much, much faster than
others, but who cares when you are inside
the universe?
What we just saw is something like
dualists solution, the stoolies solution,
we have to computational substrates that
are separate and the mind can
read data from the universe, but it
cannot write it back.
And this has some drawbacks because it
means that nothing that you experience
can be quasi relevant for what happens
in the universe.
This is called epiphenomenal, and
it's a bit inconvenient.
A way to get out of this
would be to make the universe somehow
duplicate the equivalent of some states
of your mental processing.
This is called occasional ism in
philosophy. But why should the US do
this?
So a solution is to.
Have the mind as part of the universe too
embedded into the universe and let the
universe compete with the mind because
the universe is computed in its own
computational substrate, it can do
computation that way.
It can for all these nice regular
patterns that it can also compute the
mind.
So we can have nested computational
systems, like, for instance, we can build
a computer from Redstone Blocks in the
game Minecraft.
And so, for instance, in this game
of Minecraft is powerful enough that you
can build a computer with a display and
inputs and it's powerful enough to play
games on it, but very, very,
very slowly.
It looks like this we have this Minecraft
game and the Minecraft game, you have the
Redstone computer and the Redstone
computer does the computation based on
Redstone blocks and the Minecraft game
itself runs on a PC or on a Mac on the
tablet. But the Redstone computer never
know because it doesn't have access to
the subset of the Minecraft game,
which is its universe.
It's good.
And this is pretty similar to our current
ideas of physicalism, physics
is sort of the science
that tries to find a possible
implementation on how of
how the universe does its computation
so it can produce the observations that
we can make.
And our currently dominant
set of theories says that
the universe is based on quantum
computation.
And in there we have computation that is
mostly classical, that is neural
computation that produces the mind.
Actually, it's a bit of a simplification
because we can also use other things than
brains to do thinking other than help
us thinking. For instance, we can use the
Internet or we can use notebooks and so
on and put part of our minds out there.
And in a more general sense, what the
universe uses to perform the computations
that are happening in our mind is
it increases entropy to
allow us to build structure, to think,
to compute.
We need to create structure and to create
structure. We need to reduce structure,
something else that is the increased
noise. And if you have a universe that is
maximally noisy, there can be no more
cognition or computation in it.
That's why we need to push back entropy.
Entropy is the enemy.
It could also be the other way around.
It could also be that the universe
actually is embedded into the mind.
In that case, our mind is good.
Probably don't know it, but the universe
would be a dream.
This is a situation.
Our dreams, right.
The regularities and dreams is there
because it's caused by our mind.
It's produced by our minds.
And there is no way to disprove
that. We currently could be living in a
dream. Right.
It's just maybe not the best possible
theory.
Could we be living in a simulation?
Well, I don't think that there is any
difference between reality and
simulation. It doesn't really make sense
to distinguish between the reality and
simulation any more that it makes sense
for a robot to distinguish between
a simulation that is currently in
reality. The only thing that matters
is that what patterns are
thrown at my systemic boundary, what
encodings can make of those patterns?
If you buy into this, then we have to
realize that concepts cannot really refer
to facts in the world and there is no
truths that we can get by referring
to facts out there.
We have to abandon the notion of meaning
our life becomes meaningless.
What do you have to do now is we have to
resort to something else that does the
job that meaning did before, and I would
call this suitable encoding.
The good news is that cuttable encoding
can do everything that you wanted to have
from truth and meaning only better,
we can no longer tell whether our
picture that we make eye of the world is
true or not.
But what we can say is whether it's a
suitable encoding.
If you compare to an alternative, it
doesn't work all of the times, but most
of the time it works.
So most of the time you can find a
criterion that tells us that this
encoding is better than another encoding
and criteria for these encoding.
So things like sparseness, for instance,
how many representational entities do
I need to represent this
stability?
How much do I need to update my
image of the world?
If my observations change consistency,
how many contradictions do I have in my
representation coverage
for how many of my observations can
account for integration?
How well does it fit into my existing
representations then?
How relevant is it to my needs that
I have as a system in the world that how
adaptable is it to my goals and plans
over time?
And how difficult is it to build those
encodings? How difficult is it to acquire
them? How difficult is it to store them?
And how difficult is it to maintain them?
And these are criteria that I can define.
I can define them and information
theoretic terms, which is very nice.
I can have very robust non
metaphysical definitions of those.
But if there is no truce, you might
ask me how it's possible that I make
statements like that my entire universe
are computational and there is no truth.
Well, I don't say it's true, I just say
it's the most suitable encoding.
So to come back to our
four big answers,
well,
to our four most suitable encodings.
What's the nature of reality?
I think that the universe produces
patterns that our systemic interface.
Information.
Little discernible differences that
reduce uncertainty and computation
is necessary and sufficient for that.
What can we know, oh, information,
and we can encode this information
into percepts,
into concerts, into simulations,
into world views, into culture.
And who are we?
I think that we are computational systems
that encode information and then store
that information and process it and
interpret in very, very, very specific
ways.
And we can find out details about this
class of computational systems that we
call minds by doing models of those
computational models.
These are called artificial
intelligences.
And I think it's super important to both
them to find out more about the state of
affairs, about what minds are what we
are, our relationship to the world is.
And this ties into the first question,
what should we do? First of all, of
course, we should push back entropy
because to think we need to
put energy into our bodies and we
need to push out wastes
and push waste away from us and get clean
again, and then
we need to laugh.
And if you have still time, I think we
should build artificial intelligence.
Thank you very much for this great talk.
We still have about
20 minutes for questions,
so I encourage you to line up at the
microphones and
just go ahead,
number two.
Oh, thank you, Dr. Bach, for
absolutely brilliant talk as jiggling
around in my seat. I thought it was going
to be a left brain unmaterialistic
explanation of of the brain
and consciousness. And I thank you so
much for just pushing the boundaries
further there.
But I've got some question as far as the
brain being a manifestation of an
informational computational processing
system of information coming from the
universe.
I was very interested in the end part
of your talk with your inverting whether
our mind is inside the universe or where
embedded the embedded model.
Very interesting.
I'm wondering if you could make comment,
because I'm sure you've looked at this
literature on the following.
I'll just leave this with you.
Our observation in to the experiment.
It's I think it's an interesting one.
I'd be interested in your impressions if
you'll read the literature on
near-death experiences.
At first this was a phenomenon, but now I
think the documentation on this, that is
perception in states of
no brain function.
I'm wondering if you have any comments on
that.
Could you repeat this last bit?
Nit the phenomenon and it's well
documented in the literature now.
I think it's I think from
a scientific perspective, we can say it's
a phenomenon. It's a phenomena of
perception in the absence of
brain function, for example, in
times of cardiac arrest.
Yeah.
Once these studies, for instance,
there was one at university
at the University Hospital in the U.K.
and they did studies on people with
cardiac arrest and the E.R.
and they looked at things like
extrasensory perception out
of body experience that these people had.
And they apparently formed memory while
they began recording flatlines.
And once they
started to talk about this, I wrote
emails to the people that did this survey
and to get to know
more about the data and what they have
found, for instance, they put a wart
on top of the bets for
those people that make out of body
experiences and wrote something on top of
that bored and wanted to see
whether people floating out of their body
could read what's on top of the board.
They never could.
But it doesn't mean it's impossible, just
means that they couldn't show evidence
that this out of body experience is
something else.
Then our sense of position
in the local perceptual space getting
it is attached from our body image,
which apparently can also be triggered
by, for instance, ketamine can trigger
out of body experience with some degree
of reliability for certain drugs.
And it's a dissociative phenomenon.
So we have to account for the fact that
these people there are flatlines on the
edges while they were doing those
processes.
And I think this can be accounted for by
the fact that our EEG doesn't pick up the
activity when it's very low, but
there's still sufficient to do the
necessary computations in the brain.
So I think it's the easiest and
simplest explanation is that our
measurement was not good enough to
really measure. But that's really
conscious activity going on the brain at
this point.
So you would say that was I have
prothesis for further examination.
The hypothesis is that the
level of measurement does not
detect brain activity when it still may
exist.
OK, thank you.
Microphone number one.
Yes, thank you very much for this
presentation. I think it was really good,
it also really resonates with
things I like and I think with most
people here in the room.
But something that keeps concerning me
with these
comparisons with computation and human
being is that it feels like it's a bit
presentist.
And I've read literature from one hundred
years ago where people thought, yeah, we
figured out what human beings are their
valves and their pipes,
just like the whole steampunk stuff,
because that's the mode of thinking.
And is there anything that makes you
believe that right now
this is special, that it's not just our
way of thinking applied to
the current times?
Well, the number of thinkers
that exists in the premodern age
compared to the number of thinkers that
exist in the modern age is pretty small
and the thinking of the
modern age is mostly available,
at least those parts that we know, of
course, just a tautology to our current
thinkers.
So I think that it makes sense to assume
that there's a bit of progress.
And I think a very important bit
of that progress that was not accessible
100 years ago or even 50 years ago
is the notion of computation.
We simply didn't have this before that we
had this mechanical worldview.
And it's very counterintuitive that a
mechanism, something that makes us
into it, wheels and clocks in place
can produce things like a mind.
And now we have abstracted this into
a more general causal mechanism.
The computational machine and
this mechanism that the world provides is
only incidental.
That's only important because it is able
to produce computation.
And this notion of computation, in my
view, is pretty watertight in
the sense that it can account for the
fact that the mind is an information
processing phenomenon and we can actually
prove properties about this.
So we got this nice abstract and
synthetic concepts about how
our minds could be implemented.
And I think that even in an idealistic
universe where minders primary, we would
have to account for the fact that the
mind is able to process information that
is somehow appearing at a systemic
boundary.
So in some sense, it's a general theory.
But as experience shows,
better theories tend to come along.
It just appears to me now that this
is a pretty watertight theory and a
paradigm that is going to carry us very
far.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
I believe that is a much better model
still than what we used before, but how
can we say that it is?
And you would say that it's a suitable
representation, probably,
but.
You mentioned computation that still can
emerge from a mechanical systems.
Of course, we can make Mickan fully
mechanical computers, so we shouldn't say
that the mind emerges from the
physicalities of the body
if we admit that emergence is not a thing
out there, but that emergence is actually
a relation between
different systems of description,
then yes.
So in a way, the universe is providing
us with a causal system
that is somewhat insulated from the
causal structures of the universe itself.
And within that computational causality
we can be made.
OK, thank you.
Next is a question from the Internet.
Hello. OK.
Um, do you think if we could
build a machine that more or less works
like the human brain and give it the
necessary sensory input, would
it become conscious by itself?
Yeah, I think that consciousness is a set
of functions. If these functions are
implemented, the system, the system is
going to be conscious if these functions
are missing and the system is not going
to be conscious.
All these functions are information
processing mechanisms.
I think that we can disassemble them,
that we can research them, and then we
can combine them into a coherent whole.
I think it might take many decades
and I think that it might take many more
decades than we have civilization left
on our clock.
But, uh, in principle, it's possible
and I don't see why not.
Thanks. Next from afar.
Thank you. Thank you very much for your
again for your challenging talk here.
I totally agree with the love
thesis and with the,
let's say, monist
point of view.
But at the moment, I think we have to
accept that if the universe
it's a basic feature of the universe to
create consciousness, whatever
consciousness might be or not.
But at the moment, we have to accept
that.
That's our living systems to have
cognitions and for example, pollution's
and if you look at the basic construction
principles of living
systems, you have a violation
of the Russell theory of type's
seen from the point of the DNA.
A protein is an operator and the DNA
is an apparent and seen from the point
of view of a protein.
The DNA is an operator and the protein
is the operand.
You cannot get that logical.
So my question is, do you think
that are actually available?
Formal concept of math and logic
is sufficient to
lead to a really constructed
artificial intelligence?
Yeah, I think so.
Computation is a true subset of
mathematics. Mathematics is more a
language in which you can produce
statements like, for instance, Russel's
and Autonomy and Inamine.
And these statements need to be to be
meaningful.
Computation is basically those part of
mathematics that runs
OK.
And I think that we need to build
computational models.
So in a way, I'm arguing for
a new kind of philosophy
subfield of analytical philosophy, which
is the part of philosophy that could be
expressed in a formal language.
I'm arguing for a philosophy that is
computational, that relies
on theories that everyone
but OK,
they relies on theory theories
which one?
But you have a broken hierarchy
in living systems and every
computational system isn't a hierarchical
systems and not a good one.
So how can you
solve this contradiction?
I think there's a simply because this
idea of hierarchy
and Hitachi are conceptual
ideas. They're not parts of the
territory. They are part of the map.
And in many cases, these descriptions
break down. They're just not suitable
encodings anymore.
And so we have to refrain
from concepts that are tempting, for
instance, the concept of octopuses as it
is in that category,
because they seem to be a good idea at
the time. And then we try to make our
ideas of the world conform to this idea
that is almost right until it breaks
down.
So we shouldn't be invested into those
concepts. We should pick concepts that
work. And I think in those case,
we have a description of our
domain that is not working, that is
breaking down and sometimes at some
point. So we really need to find a new
description.
So with our WSS, I agree with you because
it's not a formal concept, it's
a narrative concept.
But there are formal contract concepts
which are nonhierarchical and at the
moment they are not.
I'm sad about that.
They are not scientific mainstream, for
example, purely contextual logic by
Gotthard Gunta.
Yeah, I also agree that we
probably need to develop better
formalisms to describe a lot of things.
Mathematics is an ongoing area of
research, but I'm not sure of if
we need completely new paradigms.
So I think more needs to be done.
Thank you for the question.
OK, next, US two and then three.
Thank you for the really beautiful dark.
As an engineer, I accept everything
as someone as
psychonaut and someone who studies
philosophy, I have issues.
I think it was Alan Watts who said
they're trying to define yourself as like
trying to bite your own teeth.
And I think it's the same with
consciousness.
I think consciousness is a little bit
more fundamental than those in quantum
mechanics you have.
You know, you need a conscious observer
to manifest matter from energy,
right?
No, I don't think so. I think that the
observer in quantum mechanics and
the observer and relativity in the
observer and cognition are very
different entities.
The observer and relativity, for
instance, is a system that
could interact with another system.
The observer quantum mechanics is a
system that actually interacts with
another system, an observer, and
cognition is a conscious system.
And I think these are entirely different
notions.
Mm hmm. Um, I was under the
belief that you need a conscious observer
to manifest matter.
I don't agree at this point because I
don't see why you what I think, uh,
you need to have a system that interacts
quantum mechanics is a theory on a
possible implementation of the universe.
And at no point in the formulation of
the theory, because it's just a bunch of
mathematical formulas or either
computational formulas that
tell us how this is implemented.
Does it state that there is
consciousness?
What do you think about the empty square
C being the speed of light?
I think consciousness works on light.
We think in the form of light.
I think light is the currency of
consciousness.
I think that's very practical.
It is.
But and it's really metaphysics
at this point because
I have an issue with people who
like to discount anything that's that's
beyond empirical as it's foolish
because what is empirical?
Empirical means we have
a limited set of tools based on the
knowledge that we have now to
demonstrate certain things.
And it's always changed as our species
have evolved.
Right. That does not necessarily mean
that just because we can't measure it,
then we say, hey, this is not true.
Instead, as real engineers, as real
scientists, we should maybe
take it into account and maybe, you know,
come up with stuff that could make it
empirical.
So the issue that I have as
a second is that you
try to scope down consciousness into
a set of empirical models
and you try to say that this is
this is consciousness.
Like you take a Geopark image, a six
party by four.
The image in it is the possibility
if you permute the faces of every single
person, the everything that has
happened, everything that could not have
happened, that typic image has
the capacity to show.
Right.
The problem is that we can't do
it because we don't have computing
systems that can deal with the beauty of
infinity.
And until then, I think
we can only create pseudo
consciousness.
And that's not the same as real
consciousness.
But my problem is that I probably cannot
deal with the beauty of infinity either.
Yeah, I can trick myself into this,
but I don't have any experience of
infinity.
I don't have any experience of those
things that you find so mystical.
I can create those concepts.
And I don't see any reason why
a computer program couldn't create
equivalent concepts.
But I don't think that our minds can
fathom concepts like infinity, which is
also just a metaphysical idea.
If you're not yet right.
We we we are constantly evolving
as a species.
But we like to think that we are the apex
of evolution, we're not
we're constantly changing.
It's happening in the form of races.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a mental construct.
And I really appreciate the work that
you're doing. And I think we
need stuff like this to advance
the species.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
OK, next, this microphone three.
Hello, thanks for the invigorating talk
and thanks for putting some Minecraft
in the mix.
You had a very nice list,
kind of like a checklist for
consciousness I wanted, which seemed
basically like a feature list almost.
So I was wondering how much of that do
you think will be portable on chips
and the sense of interplaying software
hardware?
And the second part would
be once we get there and get
all the stuff on that list
implemented somehow chips,
sensors, software, whatever,
do you think the implementations will be
more or numbers?
There will be more complete AI
implementations in the sense of
my I know
my toaster will talk to me
or be my psychologist or
I would be a subset which is
more kind of like on a neat
basis.
I think this is more a question about
how society is going to pan out and
economy is going to pan out in the world
that we live in is going to pan out.
It's very difficult to say how this is
going to be. I think once we are able to
build a fully centered,
fully intelligent and fully
self conscious systems, these systems
are probably not going to be around us
that are going to battle their way up the
cognitive hierarchy and try to appeal
for human rights.
But it's more likely that they are going
to descend upon us from top down because
they are going to be business
intelligence and organizational
intelligence as they are going to augment
the non-human agency that already exists
on the planet.
And so, in a way, I
think these intelligences are already
there. They're just not very conscious
yet and they're not very efficient yet
because they have to borrow human
intelligence for their tasks and
in the way they're probably going to push
the agenda of the existing system much
further.
But as an engineer, I'm interested in
like how we can get there.
So I was just wondering what your guess
was, because in the past we
always had like very basic computing
power and then we extract it more
of those possibilities and
software.
And this seems kind of like
the other way around where
most of the computation or
like everything is simulated
in large supercomputers
or clusters and all
people are trying to bring it back down
to a hardware basically.
So the process seems very new
to me. So I'm just wondering if you have
any guess and how that might happen.
I think that computer computer power is
not the issue anymore for quite some time
now. If you look, for instance, at bird,
bird crows are able to build
sledges and slide down roofs for
them and play and solve little
problems and do plants.
Great parrots are able to learn
some basic language and
to learn negation and so on.
And so it seems that
we don't need all the new ones that we
have in our brain. And then if you look
at the new ones, we find out that they're
very noisy and that our brain is
built for redundancy.
In the most part.
I think that the main issue right now is
not so much computational power.
We can get computational power very
cheaply from Amazon.
What we need is better algorithms.
We need to have research into the
mechanisms.
And in many ways we are making tremendous
progress, especially in the last few
years with deep learning.
But we are still
way off from understanding all
the algorithms and the computational
structures that are involved.
Thank you very much.
Thanks.
Could those people migrating between
groups please quiet down a little
bit? We have only time for two more
questions. I'm really sorry to those who
have been lining up for a while, but I
think the speaker will gladly answer
them after the session.
So no one.
And the signal angel.
Um, yes, I'm here
first.
Understand correctly that you didn't talk
much about identity and difference
in relation to the minds that you don't
understand correctly.
Yeah. OK, then
how do you connect it?
I mean, how did you describe this kind
of concept of identity and difference
and also maybe alienation
and even violence?
Because these are, I think, also things
that I kind of from a society
perspective, I think very important to
consider in how we relate
as humans to each other.
So identity and difference,
alienation, violence.
How do you talk about this
in terms of the other language you are
using?
I will try to answer your question on the
lowest symbols possible level, because
it leads very, very far into cultural
implications.
And on this lowest level, if you try to
build a little robot advance around
a physical and a virtual world
and then it conducts objects, at some
point you realize that it will have to
make a determination
whether it just found objects
that look very similar to objects that
had found before or if
it just found the same objects that had
now has a different location and maybe
has different features than before.
It's a different way of processing
things, of storing things.
In one case, you have different objects,
may be similar, identical properties.
In the other case, you have objects that
might have similar features but
that are identical.
And this notion of identity is
basically means that we stick
things, the representations of objects
onto a common world line, that we have
different instances of objects.
Any object of the mind share a biography.
It's a very cognitive processing works
and we apply the sense of identity
as an extension and ourselves
as part of the concept of self, the
concept of self and the symbols case
might be the set of features that are
somehow always with us.
There's always accompanying us and always
must be accessible to us, whereas there
are features that are changing all the
time. This is what we call the
environment.
And if we find a structured
representation of all those features,
that would be part of ourself and stick
them onto a world line on something like
a biography, we have what we call
personal identity.
And this personal identity is augmented
with intentional interpretations, which
is one of our main modes of interpreting
the world. So if you have this mechanical
mode of interpretation, if you can see a
mechanism, if you have intentional
deputations, every attribute desires
and needs and wants and intentions
to objects and the world to agents.
And then we have chaotic
representations where we just take the
events to be random and
we take this intentional explanation
and apply it to our self concept.
And then we expand this into a social
persona, into somebody
who relates to the world, to the
environment, to society and so on.
And this is what I think would call
our personal identity.
It's not a thing in the world.
It's a representation.
It's a construction.
I think I would need more than an hour.
Sorry, but I think we should talk
afterwards.
OK, thank you very much.
One last question, I think I'm
switching from the Internet to this
little guy on microphone number four.
Good job.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, your show.
Thank you to thank all of you.
It was very pleasant.