Dear viewer, these subtitles were generated by a machine via the service Trint and therefore are (very) buggy. If you are capable, please help us to create good quality subtitles: https://c3subtitles.de/talk/723 Thanks!
And now let me introduce our next
speaker, Yashoda.
He is currently at Harvard
University at the Program for
Evolutionary Dynamics.
And what is probably the most impressive
achievement is that this is his fourth
consecutive talk in this room
at Congress. So he made the application
procedure four times in a row.
And I do expect him to continue for about
10 more years until he gets replaced by a
thinking machine.
So now please welcome Joshua.
Hi, fellow space
aliens, nerds,
humans, computers.
This is the first talk in a series that
tries to explain my universe and
everything through the lens of artificial
intelligence.
I'm not sure if this is the right lens
or if it's the only one and so on.
It's just one that happens to
look like the most promising to me.
And so far, I haven't seen an end
to how far the rabbit hole goes.
But before we continue on our journey,
let's do some movie reviews.
The last years were exciting
because we had three good movies on A.I.,
which is good because movies are usually
horrible.
The first one that I would like to remark
on is who are who are explored
the idea that Siri become sentient
and its operating system.
And you get to see from the perspective
of the human being what it looks like if
an A.I. that you were intimately related
to goes through a singularity
and disappears up there.
Ex Machina is a movie that
plays Turing Test together with the
audience. So basically you never get to
know whether this robot
that looks like a
humanoid is actually
sentient or if it's if it
has human, like, emotions or if it's just
a reinforcement learner that tries to
escape from the labyrinth or if there's
something else completely alien going on.
And I think the best movie that has been
made about A.I.
is the new HBO series
Best World.
What do all these things have in common?
I think they totally nail the question
what I is going to be like
if it's a hot woman.
Personally, I don't think that I is going
to manifest in this form.
I think that I largely is not going
to be living next to us as a robot.
I is going to be around
us. We are going to be inside of it.
It's going to be intelligence systems,
intelligence organizations, nation
states, corporations and so on.
So systems that already exist that have
agency and that just need more
intelligence.
But this proposal of the story
is very interesting. You basically have
this theme park and this theme park, you
have humanoid robots that look so much
like humans that they are
indistinguishable and they have human
memories and they have human emotions and
desires and they keep them in the loop
and make it impossible for them to
realize what's really going on.
They wake up in the morning believing
that they live in the Wild West and they
don't know that today they're going to be
raped and murdered because it's part of
some kind of script.
And the action in the theme park or
because some guest wants to live out a
family, a fantasy on them,
and next day they're going to
be repaired and their memories erased.
The next day starts and
some of them start
not getting their memories completely
erased and their reality starts falling
apart. And they realize that what's going
on is not the real world.
Something else is going on entirely now.
So this is maybe one of the robots
and she is realizing that
perception.
Just audio. Let's take that all
the way to the top.
So she is unlocking her intelligence by
nailing some of her minders
to place
to have some fun.
The big achievement of the series is that
it makes you realize that in some sense
you are exactly like those robots.
You are not, of course, fooled by some
perverse engineers, scientists to satisfy
the whims of the sea audience,
you are built by a perverse
evolution that needed a control system
for social primates.
Right.
And you are not a social
primate. What you are is the side effect
of the regulation needs of a social
primate. You are, in fact, a mind that
can be so much more, can go
anywhere it wants, can think any thing it
wants. It's probably much more
intelligent than the needs of a social
primate require, even though it's still
quite stupid in the hierarchy of possible
computational systems.
But, you know, we
are locked into this thing.
We are kept in the loop.
We are not waking up.
We are
basically shackled by the evolutionary
impulses
to the needs of this social problem is
quite disgusting and quite base and
boring, actually.
So once you realize that you are actually
a robot and perception doesn't
give you access to the real world, but
only gives you bits of information,
discernible differences, where do you go
from there?
Well, there is no logical conclusion.
It's not clear that you should go or if
you should go anywhere. Of course.
But what SOLOMONOV suggests that when you
want to make sense of the world, what you
have to do is you have to find the
shortest program among the best
programs that predicts
your current observation from past
observations and do this for all
observations that you ever had.
This is about as good as you can do when
you want to understand what's going on.
If you are such a robot, right.
And this is what our machine learning
systems approximate in some sense.
And it's also, I think what organisms
approximate
what are we really robots?
I mean, there are limits to computation.
To me, this is not so obvious, but maybe
I'm biased. You know, in 1983,
this was what I was looking at, my
Commodore 64.
I had just pretty much mastered it and
realized that everything that I can
dream up, I can put in there.
There's absolutely no limit except for
memory and speed.
At least I didn't see any.
And once I realized that everything that
I can imagine, I can put in there and
display on the screen somehow
if I understand it.
And this understanding is actually the
limit to which degree I am able to tease
it apart into all its functional
components, what do I
want to put in there? And of course, I
want to put in there a complete world for
somebody to talk to.
This idea of computation is actually
quite beautiful and it's pretty new in
the history of philosophy was only
discovered in the mid century,
last century, and it
has not really permeated into philosophy
and other sciences to a large degree.
And basically what it says is that
the simplest thing that you can talk
about, anything that you can get from the
universe does not matter or energy or
anything. You get discernable differences
and discernible differences, have a fancy
name. That's information.
And then you have a state, a set of these
discernable differences and computation
describes how you move from state to
state. So how the state changes and a
special case is the actual computation.
But you have discrete states and you have
deterministic or somewhat random
rules of change.
And in this computational this view,
basically the universe is something that
has the property, that it throws patterns
at your interface and these patterns,
there's regularity.
And to produce regular patterns,
you necessarily insufficiently need to be
a computer. Right.
And on the other hand, you are an
observer, probably embedded into the
universe and participating
in its computation.
And this observer is taking these
patterns at a systemic interface and it's
encoding them.
And to encode patterns, you need
to be a computer.
Right.
So computation gives you a unified
perspective on epistemology.
What can be known?
Information, metaphysics,
what's going on?
There is some kind of computation going
on and ontology, what exists.
So what exists, it's some kind of
computer, right, but
you know, what kind of computer is it?
Imagine for a moment you
are a God and you want to build
a universe just like this one.
So you are like me.
In 1983, you have to ask your parents
for a computer and they tell you,
you know, you're going to buy you the
cheapest computer that you absolutely
need for this task.
Right. What's the cheapest computer that
you're going to need?
And then you and you go to the God store
in the God world and you see a number
of computers and the window and they have
different price tags.
And the cheapest one that you can buy is
your Commodore. Sixty four is the
discrete state machine.
It has finite memory.
There's a bit more memory than my
Commodore 64, but still it's finite.
OK, and
the next thing that you could get also is
a probabilistic statement.
And it's one where you go somewhat random
from one state to the next.
You can make a probabilistic state
machine from a deterministic one by
adding a source of randomness.
Or you can do the opposite.
For instance, our brain is the
probabilistic computer.
It's that has some randomness and
how it goes from state to state.
But it can constrain this randomness by
just having more layers of neurons that
filter and amplify until you get it
as deterministic as you want.
Or it could be a quantum computer.
If it's a quantum computer, then
everything that is a state could also be
in a position of states.
And if the universe is running on a
quantum computer, it means that our
universe is able to factor large
numbers very efficiently.
Among a few other things,
actually, if you don't know that yet,
it's very interesting that we don't know
yet if our universe is able to affect
factor large numbers efficiently, only
effectively.
It could also be that factor in large
numbers is easier than we think.
It's actually a polynomial problem.
But both of you don't know this and is
able to tell us
right now quantum computers can factor
like 15 and it's seven and seven.
So I hope in the next decade
we will have to settle.
If Congress will actually work, it's
going to be super exciting.
OK, now we can take these computers
one, two, three, inet infinite memory.
The first one, our Commodore 64, was
infinite memory is our old friend,
the Turing Machine.
Or we could buy a geometric computer.
A geometric computer is a type of hyper
computer because what it can do is it can
move parts with infinite precision in
space. Right? It's stuff in space.
It's what people thought physics is for
most of the time. Right.
Still, most of the physicists think that
stuff is stuff. It is everything is stuff
in space. Not all physicists think this
is the growing minority.
Which things? Maybe not.
But for most of our history,
we thought there is stuff in space and
this stuff is moving with infinite
precision, which means you can
perform a computation is an infinite
number of decimal digits and finite
amount of time.
You can compute infinite amounts of
information and finite amount of time.
It's quite exciting if you could do this,
but apparently it's very hard to extract
something like this from the universe.
So we have string theory that explains
why the universe looks so discrete, even
though it's supposed to be stuff in space
and it could even be in a Conselheiro
computer. And also the computer is one
where you can take the results of your
computation and send it back in the past
so you can use it in the past.
And, for instance, you can observe the
lottery numbers right now, which the
universe has computed only right now, and
send it back in your past so you can fill
in your ticket and get very rich
last week.
And that's mathematically possible.
I mean, you can define a universe which
has closed time like loops,
but we don't have evidence that you live
in such a kind of universe
right now. Imagine you want to try
to use this Commodore 64, your God
computer and see how far you can get.
And there is a number of people in
physics which subscribe to
this idea and think it's quite promising.
I think it started with Conrad Suzu and
then people like Ed Fratkin and Stephen
Wolfram who have championed this idea for
a very long time.
And since they are a little bit
crazy and out there and so on, I was
not sure whether as a physicist, I
should take this idea very seriously,
even though as a computer scientist, I
find it very convincing and obvious
that you're not. Last year on 21st
of December, there are Tofte
wrote a paper, put it on archive.
It's 250 pages and it's called the
Cellular Automaton Interpretation of
Quantum Mechanics. And Tofte has the
Nobel Prize for his contributions to the
Standard Model. So he's not like a nobody
and he didn't see a limit.
So what does it mean if he can derive
quantum mechanics from a
cellular automaton?
Automaton is a very general way of
looking at things. So you basically have
a state vector, discrete bits,
and then you have a transition function
and you get the next state vector and
it's always the same transition function.
That's it. Right.
So you could see this first
thing here. This is your universe right
now, this universe.
And one step from now, and
this is the transition function that
happens. It's always the same, but you
get a new universe every time.
And the most famous.
Automaton is probably Conway's game
of life, it's defined on a
rectangular grid, and for each cell
you count the neighborhood of eight cells
and you look how many of these cells are
alive and how many are dead.
If you have exactly three neighbors that
are alive, then you come to life.
If you have two or three neighbors who
stay alive and if you have less than two,
you'll die because you are so lonely.
And if you for more than three, then you
die because it's too crowded.
This is it.
And now you start this thing and it's
going to look like this.
So in this particular starting
state, it ends in this cyclical
configuration
and a very special thing and game
of life.
This is called a glider.
It's the smallest configuration that
people have found that is going to copy
itself along the field indefinitely.
Horizontal glider is called a spaceship,
so you can see a bunch of spaceships
and they're imitated by something
like a spaceship gun and went
to spaceships, did each other, they
looked at each other.
And there's some logic that is going to
trigger the spaceship guns under certain
conditions and some
other logic that is going to transmit
some information around.
What you can see is this game of life is
pretty complex. Is Turing complete
mechanical Turing Machine said,
and what somebody has built in years.
I mean, I think you can already see it.
So, of course, this looks very boxy and
somebody has said, let's make it
continues, let's not use square boxes
but round disks and use a circular
neighborhood and count the number of
pixels in a circular neighborhood that
are filled. And then we use suitable
interval to decide on life and death.
There are very similar to the ones in
your standard game of life.
And what you get is something that looks
like this.
So it's been the same thing.
It's just a little bit more continuous
and you get letters that can move in all
directions.
No, I'm not.
Of course not suggesting that our
universe looks like this at the base
level, but it's very tempting to think
that this looks something like this and
that particles might be something like
letters that get copied along until they
bump into something else.
Our universe has a peculiar property in
this peculiar property is that B cannot
have nice things like, you know, if you
live in Minecraft, you can build up
a pretty mobily, a computer that doesn't
need an energy source and so on.
And it's because of Minecraft, you have
no entropy.
It would be pretty neat if you live in
Minecraft, because I think we could live
forever.
Why is it that we cannot have nice things
in our universe?
And I think that's because our universe
has the peculiar property that we cannot
lead information in it.
It's an empirical fact that seems to be
awfully hard to delete information.
This is what the laws of conservation
seem to suggest.
And if you have an irreversible
system like this computer here,
this rain up, you are living cell and so
on, it's something that leads
bits and every step irreversible system.
And something can, for instance, perform
an operation where you conflate
two bits and you don't know which was
which after you performed the operation.
Right.
And if you are a living system, you
stabilize yourself against disturbances.
My brain is supposed to work in similar
ways, whether I'm here in Cambridge and
the gravity environment is probably
totally different and there is no
radiation that's different and
messing with my brain in different ways.
And still it's going to work in the same
parameters.
And my body temperature is rather
independent from yesterday's body
temperature and so on within certain
boundaries. If I go very far out and I
stay there, you know, but
so I try to dileep it and if I delete
bits, what do I do?
If the underlying substrate is
reversible, I can
make a reversible system on top of an
irreversible one by just ignoring all
operations that were deleted.
That's very easy, right?
But the opposite as heart
is, whenever I want to delete bits, if
I am a reversible substrate, I need to
hide them somewhere, which means I have
garbage bits. Now these garbage bits are
going to accumulate unless I have a very
big place to hide them, which means I
want to be an open system.
There's openness can be temporary.
So if you have an area of deep space
that exists for a while, until the
universe goes, until the big crunch,
maybe that's sufficient.
But without this openness, you cannot
get rid of your garbage bits.
And you also need something to replace
the garbage bits that you push out.
So you basically need an entropy gradient
gradient from NEKE entropy to entropy.
And observers to create internal order,
every computer that is forming memories
after observing things that are
independent of the underlying substrate
and so on, you need to be irreversible.
And if you live in an irreversible
universe, you will always have to observe
entropy.
And without any entropy gradient, you
must die.
So life is something that is, in this
universe, probably extremely temporary
phenomenon. It only exists at this
temporary bubble of entropy
for a very short time.
OK, Miles, as I have said, our
computational observers,
but shouldn't believe the explanation of
minds to philosophers and psychologists,
I mean, it's their field after all right
now imagine we ask them to explain
flight. How would they go about
this?
I suspect that psychologists would start
looking at the behavior of birds.
I don't know how far they get if they
look at the behavior of birds for very
long time to understand flight very
deeply. You know, thinking about thinking
is not really part of psychology.
Psychologists look at behavior.
That's what they do.
If you ask a neurobiologist to
study flight, they will probably look at
birds with microscopes
and they will get extremely pretty
pictures.
And after a while, they will announce
that it's very, very hard to simulate
a cubic millimeter of a bird is going to
be very hard to understand flight.
And if you ask the
philosophers, it depends on whom you ask.
If you ask the analytical philosopher,
they probably say, you know, you can take
the bird apart down to the level of
individual molecules.
And once you do this, what you'll find
is that nothing is flying there.
So.
So flight is obviously already given,
maybe it's a property of the universe
itself that only gets some more channels
to the bird
anyway. It's very hard and confusing.
Couldn't we talk about free flight
instead?
If you ask it phenomenological
philosopher, they will tell you, what is
it like to be a bird?
You'll never know.
If you ask Roger Penrose,
he will say it's quantum mechanics.
These birds have very special
microtubules and they allow them
to use quantum effects for flying.
This is how it works.
So Marvin Minsky said, no, we cannot
leave us with these guys because they
don't know what they're doing anymore,
minds are information processing systems.
So if you want to study minds, we need to
start a new science. And this is what you
did 60 years ago, together with a few
other people. And he said that if my
information processing systems, then we
can teach computers how to think.
And by doing this, we will learn what
thinking is.
He thought that thinking is symbolic,
unfortunately, so it was he settled on
the wrong horse and this created,
unfortunately, this schism and I think
contributed very much to it.
He thought that Bestilo knowledge
like Computerland stuff into a database,
and he proceeded to yell at everybody
who was doing stuff that he considered to
be too simplistic, like neural networks
and robotics and so on.
And if you have people that you get
yelled at because they do something that
works very well for them, they usually
don't join your camp.
Instead, they stop talking to you.
And so these people the other day, people
didn't read very much psychology
and philosophy and build the
applications.
And Minsky's disciple's, mostly
the symbolic A.I.
after reading about reading psychology
and that it was unfortunate.
And it's still haunting us to some degree
right now, even though we're catching up
and the fields are getting unified.
But I don't think that Minsker is really
to blame because the question what is
intelligence in 1950 was very similar
to the question, what is life in 16
fifty?
You know, in 60 and 50 the billion, you
will by extension, you could point at it
and say this is life.
And then people guess, is it some magic
force? Maybe it's something duelist going
on, who knows?
And the idea what we know
now, life oversells could not be
discovered before 1839
when the cell theory came up.
And even after this, it took a very long
time before people realized
they would do psychology. But we actually
does. He studies cells and systems that
are made from cells.
Life is always cells.
These are cells stabilizing and immutable
and molecular machines.
And there is no known precedent for life.
I mean, there must have been at some
point, but there is no left.
And it's easy to understand why.
I mean, if you are still alive, you
better get a membrane first because you
are going to be very unstable.
Right.
And from the perspective of the cell,
there is no organism.
The cell is just drifting through this
darkness and sometimes the few molecules
are drifting over its membrane and it's
going to react to those molecules and
this is it.
And the organism is an emergent
phenomenon of many cells that talk to
each other like this.
But they don't know that there are other
cells out there because they don't have a
brain and they don't have sensors to see
them.
A cell is interesting, the smallest
universal machine that we know that is
capable of extracting entropy
over a wide range of environments.
This is what cells to extract, Nick
entropy.
They harvest some chemical
operations that require fine grained
control. So they have this market
opportunity because they can
do things that other chemical processes
on this planet cannot.
And to do this, they need some pretty
complicated logic, so if you zoom into
a cell, you see this membrane
and inside you have lots and lots
of apparatus that are chemical reactors.
And these chemical reactors produce
all sorts of chemicals that the cells
need for their metabolisms and given
circumstances. And inside of the cell,
you have this interesting
structure which stores the cells,
operating systems.
And to to do this, you need very
complex and pretty poorly understood
machinery. It's so complex that
you cannot build it very close to
where physics is happening.
You have to do it about 25 magnitudes
above the Planck length.
For instance, this is a molecular
machine.
This is a machine that is able to splice
and copy DNA and that is
roughly what it looks like in real time.
I think that's pretty amazing.
And we have probably lots and lots of
machines like this in cells.
A big insight for me recently was that
DNA is not a blueprint, it's not the
blueprint for an organism.
At no point in the life of the organism,
there is no cell, there's always a cell.
And the cell is
has this operating system and its
operating system is made of routines.
And these routines are called genes.
A gene is something between
a few hundred bytes and a few
megabytes long. Usually it's in the order
of something like a 100 K or so.
And these proteins can
do only four things.
They can regulate something in the cell.
So it goes back into homeostasis
or they can differentiate the cell so it
becomes two different cell or they can
start the division of the cell, a program
that ends with have it.
You have two cells of that type or it can
kill the cell. This is all you can do.
And from this you get everything else.
There's a little bit mutation and
selection. Everything else emerges.
It's amazing, isn't it?
So organisms are basically colonies
are very closely related single celled
organisms, they get very specialized
and to do this,
they have to divide and specialize into
different parts. Is this just the cells
that you have in your blackens part of
them? And every
of these cells runs the same operating
system? In a sense, it cannot really be
true because they do very different
stuff. They need a lot of states.
So it's probably that the genome is like
the room in which you store this
operating system.
There's also a room, which is the
epigenome. It's like the flash drive that
the cell uses to store its state and
it can also be copied along if you
differentiate the cell and.
Over the life of the cell, this
epigenetic storage by reading and writing
gets fragmented and there was a
fascinating paper last month and in cell
and they discovered that there are genes,
Yamanaka factors, which for genes that
you can use to defragment the cell to
get it back to its original state.
So it gets completely rejuvenated.
And why is it that
we don't have this and get Rejuvenator?
Well, there's only one animal that is
able to really use this that we know of.
There's only one animal that we know that
is completely immortal in multicellular.
It's totally topsiders and which
is a small hydra. And it can go back from
the hydros stage to
the jellyfish stage and back and forward.
And when it does this, it can completely
reset itself because it's rebuilding its
organism on a cellular level.
If we as people would do this and
we turn ourselves into an
undifferentiated state, which happens if
you remove the instance of the
operating system on the flash drive,
that's very bad for you.
Right. So this is what happened
to Tatsu and Akira.
And I mean, you became immortal in the
process, but it was not a pretty sight.
So
once you saw the light and together they
specialize and some of these cells, some
fat cells are getting teased and prodded
into doing information processing and
become neurons.
And most of the what they do is
regulating feedback loops for the
organism. So in our brainstem, we have
lots and lots of feedback loops.
And these people are exposed to things
like regulate your body temperature and
heart rate and so on, your breathing
pattern.
And often this is not enough.
So on top of this, you have a limbic
system and this limbic system gives
you pleasure and pain.
Pleasure tells you to do more
of what you're currently doing
paintless. You do less of what you're
currently doing.
We also need some impulses that tell
you to seek out future pleasure and avoid
future pain.
And it's all related to the needs of
the organism.
So we have social needs, things
like affiliation to need
to belong and so on, and legitimacy,
the need to conform to internalized norms
so we can play together in groups
and see meaning and things and so on.
We have things like
dominance, the need to rise
through social hierarchies and so on,
the need for romantic affection we have.
Then of course, the basic physiological
needs, hunger, thirst and so on, pain,
avoidance, libido.
And we have cognitive needs
and need to become more competent to gain
new skills. And they have a need to
explore and we have needs for its
tactics.
And all these need to be regulated in
homeostasis.
This is what makes us human and they
shift us around and this need systems.
So we need to seek out goals to satisfy
these needs or avoid the frustration.
And to do this, we need to associate
the needs with situations in the
world. And this is done in the hippocampus.
A lot of animals have an hippocampus that
basically takes situational patterns and
connects them to learning with these
needs so we can seek them out in the
environment.
And the humans have something very fancy
on top of this. It's the neocortex in the
neocortex can be seen as something like
an extension of the hippocampus.
And the neocortex is generalizing over
these situations. It's just as a pattern
of what all these parents have in common
of a different type.
So how does this work?
And the neocortex is making this model of
the world that we experience.
And as I said, Minsky thought
for most of his life that we can treat it
as something like a database.
And I think a better way of looking at
this is to have something
like a synthesizer.
You know, when you try to understand
sound with the synthesizer, what you can
be doing is you
take in the raw data that comes in from
your cochlea, which is like a physical
Fourier transform sent into your cortex.
And it looks something like this
green line here. And then you fiddle on
the knobs and your oscillator.
This oscillator is made off, of course,
and you do this until you are able to
reproduce the pattern.
So once the pattern has started, you know
how it continues and then you can predict
the pattern, you understand it.
And you don't only do this for the sound,
you also do it for vision like colors and
for spatial frequencies and so on.
Of course, there's a slightly different
synthesizer and so on.
And once you've done this, you can build
a synthesizer on top of the synthesizers
and the synthesizer on top of that
synthesizer is going to look for patterns
in the patterns.
So you get simple percepts and you'll get
phonemes and so on.
And it hasn't stopped there.
Then you can combine it all into a
complete mental simulation,
is that plays out in your mind
and you don't need to stop at this mental
simulation. You can also take
many simulations and generalize over
those and find the patterns in them.
And then you get concepts and then
you can use these concepts for reasoning
and you can transform them into language
and talk to other people about them.
But what you do at each stage is the same
thing. You would basically look for
patterns and the patterns.
There are two types of learning.
There's a low level functional
approximation that is basically based
on learning.
You can do as many paradigms, but it
comes down to pretty much the same
statistics. In the end, it's releasable
and it models the complete space.
Like when you look at the world as a baby
for a few months, you have learned the
laws of perspective and lighting, and
they don't change very much during life.
So, you know, when an object moves and
distance becomes smaller, it's actually
an object of invariance size.
You learn all these things, you learn all
these functions.
But when we play the world up there,
the conceptual world for ideas
exists and people exist and politics
exist and so on.
We cannot model the complete space
because we don't get enough sampling data
and the dimensionality of the space is
too high. So instead, what people do
is they use as far as MDP Markov
decision model
also called a story.
And it's basically depletable,
like the stock market.
We don't model the complete stock market.
There's all the probabilities.
We pick a single stock or a couple stocks
and then we try to see if they work.
These are the stories that people, even
if they totally don't work, we pick
different stocks.
And from these all these things we built,
this mental simulation that plays out,
this is what we perceive of the world,
this mental simulation is the world that
we believe to be in.
And it's nothing like the world out
there.
The world or there is some kind of
computational shithole.
You don't you cannot live in there
because it's just some weird quantum
processes going on that are entangled
with your retina and your other senses
and your neural networks are
going to try to predict the patterns to
come into the senses.
And to do this, they create all this
elaborate structure which you perceive.
So out there in the world, there is no
color, no sound, no people.
There is structure and the structure is
regularity in them.
And the regularity that you find is
projected in your mind.
And people find similar regularity, so
it seems to be not new, but
it's probably not what's out there, it's
the function of relationships that you'll
find. It's functional abstractions.
So our neocortex is an organ that is
able to simulate a dynamic world that's
literally very much like a dream.
It loses the same circuitry as your night
time dreaming. Only daytime dreams
are connected to your sensory input and
constrained by it.
And to do this, you have small circuits,
the cortical columns made of a few
hundred neurons, you have a 100 million
of them, and I think that they are
probably something like a state machine.
And the state machine takes care of
neural binding. And each of them is a
small function, approximate or embedded
in the state machine.
They can talk to their neighbors and form
larger computational units and
for instance, has a certain size.
It's a brain area and the brain
areas talk to each other and form
processing streams.
And together they play the music of your
mind. It's like an orchestra.
Each brain area has something like 50.
Brain areas is like an instrument,
each of them playing a specialized part
of the music of your mind.
And they listen to the instruments around
them and thereby form streams.
The language, the music propagates.
So from the outside, these musicians
taking sensory patterns and playing motor
patterns and so on and back in there
you get more and more integration
abstraction and you'll
find similar structure to this model in
the brain. And this orchestra has
a conductor. This conductor is not some
kind of magical homunculus.
It's a brain area like the others.
And what it does, it's
deciding what's been played tonight.
The orchestra can play very well on its
own, but if you turn off the conductor,
you become a sleepwalker.
You can still get up at night and
randomly make dinner or talk to somebody.
But there's nobody home in you.
And this conductor is doing
executive function, is resolving
conflicts between the different
instruments and tells them to tune up or
tune down and so on and
change resource allocation and
to do all these things. It maintains a
protocol of what it is at all.
And this protocol is basically a story
that the system tells itself about
itself. The conductor cannot listen to
the whole orchestra. It only listens to
one or a couple instruments at a time.
There's a low resolution, but this is
what it puts into the protocol.
And this protocol is the only part
where our experience gets integrated.
So there's lots and lots of experience
happening in the brain, but these parts
of the brain don't know about each other.
The only in this protocol, they get
together.
And when you access this protocol, you'll
remember what happened there in these
situations, replay these situations in
your brain.
And at some point you also be able to
replay the fact that you accessed
your protocol. So you put into your
protocol the fact that you accessed your
protocol. You have this voice in your
head and you start listening to that
voice and understanding what this voice
says. So now your system
is able to remember
that it attended to itself a moment ago
that perceived itself as being conscious
a moment ago.
And I think this is necessary and
sufficient for consciousness.
So they are probably not actually
conscious in this very moment.
But we do have is a memory of having been
conscious of something a moment ago.
Come to think of it, it's much easier to
build, right? It's not very magical.
So what's it with reality,
you know, imagination and our world
modeling and so on, use the same circuits
and you imagine something.
You use generative models of your brain
that normally are used for perception and
to make sure that you don't mistake your
imaginations for perceptual
stuff, the brain is going to take the
imagination as imaginary.
And the real stuff is real,
right? It's a tech that is put on a part
of the representation of the look real to
you. If this doesn't work, you get
hallucinations, which is kind of awkward.
The brain can also take conceptual
structures as real. For instance, I
somehow believe that the financial system
is real, even though I never perceived
it. And my understanding is probably all
wrong.
Mathematics is very special because
mathematics is just the domain of all
formal languages, is a game played with
symbols, and
it has the same reality, I think, as a
novel that is not read.
So if you have a role, there's not just
a bunch of characters of symbols, right.
When you open it, you hallucinate some
story in your mind.
And but, you know, the story is not real
because somebody has written it, the
symbols into the book. That's it.
And the fascinating thing about
mathematics is that you don't need to
write it into the book. It writes itself.
You just need to pick a few suitable
axioms. And everything else follows from
these axioms because mathematics is
largely discovered, it feels real to the
brain. And this notion that the
metaphysics of mathematics is real
is called Platonism.
I think it's an illusion.
Reality is, in fact
a brain state.
So this leaves us with some
sort of final embarrassment,
and this is.
You know, the
Commodore 64.
Where does it come from?
We can understand how we work, we are
computational, we understand the
universe, how it works, its
computational, and they don't see a limit
to this perspective.
All these big questions that I ask myself
and I started my journey, something like.
Maybe 35 years ago, when I was in
front of this Commodore 64,
how is it possible that a system kind of
emotions, how can it have goals and
motivation?
How is it possible that we can be
conscious?
How is it possible that stuff is moving?
How is it possible that stuff looks real
to us and so on?
All these questions kind of disappear
when you think about them hard enough.
But one question remains, and this is
what put the Commodore 64 into the void.
It's still pretty costly if you think
about it. Right. Something must be taking
away. They're at the heart of the
universe and they have no idea what it
is. And you cannot know it because we
cannot see it from the outside.
But it's the cheapest thing I found to
put there. Everything else that you can
put there, I think is more expensive than
the Commodore 64, which is a very, very
large memory.
So we touched a number of topics today.
We talked about computational universes,
we talked about digital physics, and
we talked about life as the extraction
of entropy.
We talked about the bill that is a dream
produced by our perception.
We talked about the model of
cognition as a synthesizer instead
of symbolic system, and we
talked about the conductor theory of
consciousness and about
the reason for entropy
and that we will all die.
That's quite a bunch of stuff for an
hour, if you have a lot of it, but
you have a little bit of time left
because I've been talking extremely fast.
There's one thing that has
has been puzzling me for a long time, and
this is the thing that has bee left.
You know, then racialism came along
in the 17th century.
People felt a revulsion to it because
in a restless universe, there is no room
for love and meaning but free to come
from, I mean,
some perspective in this fashion as well.
We are just moving bits of rocks or
computational machines or whatever.
How is it possible that anything is
meaningful? How is it possible that there
is a purpose?
How is there space for the sacred?
And as a result, we got romanticism and
romanticism is basically the fight
against rationalism for love
you. Don't you want to keep this thing in
the universe the sense of meaning, of
connection to something that is beyond
what is it?
How can we feel this?
There is something going on there.
Right.
And I think it has an
easy explanation.
And this explanation is part of
evolution. You know, we are
subject to multilevel selection
inside of our organism.
There is going to be a competition
between individual cells and they form
together a group.
And this group is the organism.
And this organism is competing with
other organisms.
And these organisms in turn are forming
groups, small populations, and they're
competing with other populations.
So we have levels and levels and levels
of competition going on and
mutation and selection.
Right.
But the interesting thing is that at
these levels, they are opposing forces.
If you have these cells and the organism
or the people in the group, if one
of these cells is not an altruist, but a
super egotistical and just cheats
and basically is not an angel that uses
all the resources that the angels give us
and just free riders,
then they are going to have a better
time. They have time for getting laid to
reproduce and so on while the angels do
all the hard work right.
So from an evolutionary
perspective, the angels
are not in a good situation.
But if you have a group that has a lot of
angels, a lot of altruists, and
it's in competition with a group of lot
of egotistical individuals, guess who's
going to win? The group is altruists.
So evolution needs to find a solution to
make sure that your group is largely
comprised of angels
and inside of the organism.
It does this for making sure that nobody
gets to procreate except
the organism itself.
So they have some dedicated cells of
our gonads that can reproduce.
But our skin cell has no chance of ever
reproducing. So our skin cell
has no skin in the game.
The only thing they can do is to be
altruistic because it's outperforming the
other cells for its own benefit.
Nothing good is going to happen to the to
cancer. Everybody is just going to die.
Right?
So this is how organisms
do it and this is how state building
insects do it. So only the queen can give
rise to offspring.
The individual worker ants cannot do it.
And this doesn't work for humans because
it's so much work to give
birth to somebody that a single queen
cannot do it for the humans.
So we need to find something else.
And what we do have is something, a
system that works with punishment and
reputation. So if somebody is just
a free rider and a cheater, we have a
petition system, we talk about them, we
punish them. You might even ostracize
them or kill them.
Right. And this
punishment system works pretty well.
The drawback is that it doesn't scale
very well after a couple hundred
individuals. It's over because we cannot
keep track of everybody's reputation.
So what you want you have want to have is
an internalized reputation system.
And this in turn, the reputation system
basically uses some of the drives
on the social needs.
It uses the need to conform to
internalized norms.
And this need to conform, to internalize
norms means that
you'd pick up a few rules in your moment
when you are young and you want to be
good, but being good, it means you
just follow these things.
Even when nobody is looking, you're
not going to eat from the
fridge of your flatmate,
even if nobody is looking.
If you are a good person, it's not
virtuous. It has not you have no honor.
If you do this right, it
may be not rational if you cannot be
caught, but you don't do this,
especially the group mind reaching down
into the individual mind.
And it's also there are some
other drives that happen this hour need
to belong and our need for status that
are important for the reputation system,
but this need to conform, to internalize
norms that need to be good is important.
Now, the problem is, Norm, is that they
are somewhat arbitrary in different
societies, have different norms.
So norms are largely cultural, obviously,
and goodness is an arbitrary
vector and value space.
And this vector gets synchronized between
people through empathy largely.
So you're in a group, something feels
right and people
pick up this feeling of, oh, this feels
right, this is good.
This is what we need to do.
And it gets multiplied with the social
status. So if you dress up somebody as an
authority, as a priest or a politician
or is an eminent speaker or
as a professor, then you're
not somebody like me.
You will feel that
what they say is right, that there is
this normative and you have a compulsion
to conform to this.
And if you feel differently
for logical reasons, then you will have
to bear some considerable cognitive
dissonance. But people tend to pick
up these norms easily.
And this means that people are
programable.
People can be programed to run societal
software in places that are ideology's,
bodies of norms, bodies of rules or how
to interact, and they can structure
the interaction of large groups of
individuals. And it's not based on
reputation. So it can scale arbitrarily
as long as you can project your norms
efficiently.
And our societies used to do this via
mass media.
We can get people to be nice.
And this belief, assimilation, if you are
a nerd like me, is somewhat broken, so
you still try to be good,
but you don't feel it by empathy, what's
the good thing?
You need to do this by arguments.
You talk to others and you see all of
this. This is a good argument.
Yeah, this is goodness.
So this is what I'm willing to do.
But it's hard in this way for
us to synchronize this your nation with
your family unit, your social group, and
see this as the intrinsic good.
So your direction of the system that's
larger than yourself that you can serve
your group mind is going to be directed
on an abstract world, on a metaphysical
world, in a platonic world, on
the transcendental world.
And I think this is the nature of
transcendence. It means that your
meaning, your purpose, the system that
you are serving cannot be found in this
world. It's found in a platonic world.
And I think this is by many nerds to
art or science.
So if you make complicated patterns,
this is transcendental, it's a search
for meaning, it's pretty broken and you
think about it.
OK, I think this
is enough for today.
We have 50 minutes left so we can do some
Q&A
and I thank you very much for your
attention.
Before we begin the Q&A, just a quick
reminder, if you need to leave,
either do so now and very, very quietly,
you'll stay until the end of the slot
because you're not being sneaky as you
think you are.
As always, if you have questions, the
line up at the microphones, please.
If you're unable to get to the
microphones for some reason and laziness
does not count, just raise your hand and
we'll try to get a microphone to you.
And if you on the stream, just post your
questions and we will also get some
questions from the Internet.
And now let's start a microphone for
please.
Hey, um, do
you believe that somehow soonish
we are going to
go through a sort of social
enterprises where we're going to
become a different
superorganism?
And if yes,
what are the biggest challenges,
challenges that you see
in this process?
Well, we are already one of
our societies, our superorganisms, if
you want, but their information
processing is broken.
And I think what we need to do is we need
to build a nervous system
for humankind right
now than ever.
Academia is trying to work on topics
that are only veining by tools like
computer science. You're not going to
get a career in computer science
if you have proofs that are wrong.
Right. But if you
want to have a career in economics and
you make suggestions that are costing
somebody a billion dollars, chances are
that you're not going to get tenure.
At least they're going to be some forces
that oppose you.
And some if you
lie in the right way to get people
some money, there are some
forces that are going to support you.
And for this reason, it seems that
our mechanisms of creating
knowledge in domains that are policy
relevant are broken.
So we have difficulty in our societies to
find out what's actually happening on the
ground. We don't have very good models of
the economy. We have very poor models
of ecology and so on, and we
have difficulty allocating resources
properly.
So, for instance, with respect to global
warming, I think we would definitely need
to put a lot of resources into
postapocalyptic science
at this.
Thank you. Thank you.
This Titanic in front of the iceberg and
the iceberg is there and we put a
considerable amount of resources into
computing the last remaining dutches of
probability that you maybe not hit the
iceberg, but we all know it's somewhere
in the 90s percent.
Right. And so
I think it would be rational to put
considerable amount of resources into
exploring the question, what's going to
happen after we hit the iceberg?
How do we rebuild what's left?
And instead, most of our senses
that the city planning and
the economical planning and labor
market planning and so on are predicated
on the status quo. That everything
happens continues as it
is insane.
And it's because of the systemic
incentives that we said that the people
that are successful and get to the top
positions are those that are successful
in the given system, not the
next system.
So whenever a system comes under stress,
it's much harder to fix it.
We need to fix all these things and we
don't know how, but I think it's possible
to fix it at some level.
Our brain is not lying to itself at the
lowest levels.
So nervous systems don't lie to
the organism about the fact that it hurts
itself or not, and
only if it helps the organism.
And right now we have systems that
corrupt our thinking.
And I think we need some to think about
some type of new social media that
filters information by truth and
relevance instead of
things that are addictive.
So I don't know what this thing is going
to look like and if you manage to build
it in time, but I think
it should be possible, it's
probably worth thinking about.
Could we get a question from our global
nervous system, the Internet?
Lots of people on the Internet
were wondering what if this is already
proven and what is the stuff you're
inferring?
So they would like you to
provide a link collection or a glossary
on further reading and know a lot
of the stuff is already really proven
known to be true.
I think nothing of this is ever really
proven because there are alternative
views of the world, and a lot
of the things that I tell you are
speculative in the sense that
we don't know if the world is a discrete
state machine. And there are
some physicists that are reasonable that
think it's possible that it is.
And there are many physicists, majority
actually, which think it's probably
something else altogether and we don't
know. So what I'm trying
to show you is a particular kind of
rabbit, also particular school of
thought, which I find exciting.
And I just want to show
you a way to explore this land with
me.
So I do think that these things are true
or they have a good chance of being true.
And I will probably change my views on
them in the future.
I think that they're convincing.
They convince me.
With respect to Mayan's, I think they are
probably the only game in town.
Mike, number five, please.
Hello. Thanks for your talk.
And we're able to recognize
limitation, computational limits on
external systems like a cat
cat will probably never understand
physics.
But as all systems,
do you think that we'll ever be able to
recognize an upper computational limits
for ourselves as conscious beings?
Probably, and we
made some estimates in
my class and I taught a class in the
Media Lab last year, and so we discussed
about what's the computational
power of the human brain.
And then we estimated that maybe
we can take coding a column
encoded in something like three kilobytes
before the Attracta states and the actual
for connectivity that it has and
the function approximation
that you've put in there and so on.
And if you multiply this with the number
of columns and maybe you can
run a person on one hundred gigabytes, if
you only knew how long, maybe a couple
of hundred gigabytes, but something in
this ballpark and
it could also be a few terabytes.
But we don't know.
We also know that based on how long you
live, you're not going to perform more
than like a million concepts because
life is short. And even if you form a
couple of concepts every half hour or so,
you're not going to be substantially more
than a million concepts before we die.
So this gives
us an idea about how complex
our cognition is.
I think it's not as complex as we
imagined because our life is so short and
the amount of data that we get to see is
so little.
Mike, number one, please.
Hey, thank you for your talk.
One question arose when you were
talking about love.
How would the joy to to level
the joy to not conform fit
into your model?
I think that's largely because you have
in groups and out groups, if
you have an inner group or people that
you love, it means that you serve the
sacred to them.
You serve the system that is bigger than
you, that you are serving
because you recognize it in the other,
the sacred.
And this is at the core of love, the
service.
And of course, not everybody is serving
the same God. And there are others that
are doing things that you consider to be
evil or stupid, the outcome of members.
And if you are surrounded by group
members, you're going to feel
much better if you have ways of fighting
back and being mischievous
or being evil to them and so on
might be a way to fight against evil that
you perceive as hostile and as
something that is not part of your group.
Just the joy, the joy element
is not so much explained the
joy, but there is a benefit and
aggression sometimes because we are a
competitive species, too.
Not all of us are.
They are differences in competitiveness.
I think I'm not very competitive.
Don't get much out of this.
But you see that a number of people that
really enjoy very much winning
over others and there is a joy
in winning and breaking the other and
being stronger than them and destroying
them and taking their resources,
extracting the neck entropy from their
volume of space.
OK, thank you.
Could we get a microphone number seven,
please?
Hi, and thank you for the talk
about the idea that what we are
experiencing is not what's actually
out. There is something I read
about when reading about meditation
as well.
Have you come across this concept
in this context and do you maybe even
have experience?
Yes.
This so
when you meditate very deeply, when you
do Vipassana, for instance, you can
experience a state in which you detach
yourself from
your self concept and from
all these findings, from your body image,
from your perspective
on yourself as a person even.
And when you do this,
you can experience yourself in the third
person perspective. If you think about
yourself, it's difficult then to identify
with you and realize that,
for instance, the motives and impulse are
still there, but they are no longer
direct you.
They are like a ghost.
They're somewhere in the background.
Your self concept does not integrate them
very much.
And this is when you realize the thing
that the robot's
investible to realize that reality falls
apart and they're not really this
humanoid robots. There are mines that are
more general than what they're being
used for.
Thank you.
Could we get the Internet, please?
Yet Drasin wants to know,
did any of this research attempts
to resolve pathological brain
patterns?
All right.
Well, I'm not a doctor, so I'm not
competent in doing this.
But I suppose that many
of us, when we try to understand anything
in the world, we do so because
we think something needs to be debarked.
Our self concept might actually be an
attempt of our system to Dibakar itself.
So at some point, the baby
thinks that the world is pleasure and
pain and then it realizes that pleasure
and pain is not a feature of the world,
but of itself.
And then I realized this, that it's not a
direct representation.
For instance, you might realize that
you've cut yourself and it hurts
a lot, but it's only a very tiny cut.
So you need to downplay this and you
realize it's a signal that is very
strong. It's not objective reality.
And so you do this step by step.
And at some point you get to the point
where I realize I'm not my values, I'm
not this person anymore.
And it's a process of reverse engineering
where you make a model of yourself and
then you make a model of something.
It's usually because you cannot regulate
the disturbances with the existing
feedback loops.
So something is going wrong.
When you are very conscious of something,
it means that something in this area is
broken. And I suppose the nerds
try to understand the universe.
They deep down feel that the universe is
somehow broken. They need to debug it
and it probably means something is
actually broken. And then so as children
there, maybe their social interaction
didn't work because they were too nerdy
and they did meet other nerds in which
they could interact with their normal
nerd ways.
Instead, they were surrounded by humans
and they didn't know that they thought
they were humans.
And there's a lot of confusion and pain.
And as a result, you try to look back the
universe because you don't find the bug
in yourself.
So in some sense, I
think that I try to understand
my own pathologies and those of the
people that I love and all the other
people that I meet.
But it's more a side effect that my own
goal is really to understand what we are.
Could we get microphone number three,
please?
Uh, hi, you mentioned before and
corruption of data that leads to
instability.
And I wanted to point out something that
I think is a corruption
of data in your presentation.
You have the need for dominance
in one of your slides.
That illustration.
And I think that is
a representation of the culture
of dominance that also leads to
capitalism.
And capitalism isn't renewable,
sustainable, sustainable.
Um, I think that
a need should be replaced with a
need for social stability.
And actually, if you look at history and
other systems
in nature, you can also see that it's
not the culture, the
systems that strive for dominance
that stay alive, but
the ones that search for
ways to fit into the system that they
have at the moment.
That's also this need for dominance.
This culture is what is destroying our
planet at the moment. And I think that's
worth mentioning.
Mm hmm.
I totally share your sentiments or
most of my friends are basically hippies.
And if you have a valley full of
hippies that do ecological
farming and dance
and marry and
next village, you have a valley of
brigands that are vicious and strong
and Vikings basically that
are willing to pillage and so on.
What do you think is going to win?
And this means that
if you just let evolution run its course,
you will probably get something like an
equilibrium because you need some that
to farm the land and you will have
some that are going to attack and
that you need to push back the immune
system and so on.
And I think that motivation itself
is not adaptive.
Motivation is not a cultural construct.
Motivation is resistive.
Motivation is what puts up resistance to
the environment. This was motivation you
would just give into inertia
and this means you would stay in bed.
You were just brought in bed to give into
physics. You don't get up.
You would become a blob on the floor.
And the only reason why you're not a blob
on the floor is because you have
motivation, something that makes you push
yourself up in the morning and brush your
teeth and have breakfast
and shower and have sex and all these
terrible things that we do ourselves
because we get pleasure and we do them
in pain and we don't do them.
And as a lot of people that
feel this urge to be dominant
and they get pleasure out of being
dominant and
some others don't very much.
And we can change as a culture as how we
value this, I think.
So we can have an influence by saying
this is a desirable behavior.
This is why we want to interact.
And this behavior that if you don't want
to have and this means that different
types of people are going to get in
different positions in different
societies.
That's my current perspective.
It might be wrong, of course.
I think that hunger, thirst, curiosity
and sexual reality.
I'm sorry. Get up at the wrong time.
We don't need attackers.
OK, please give a warm round of applause.