Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Joscha's Twitter: https://twitter.com/Plinz
Joscha's Website: http://bach.ai

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:33 - Life is hard
2:56 - Consciousness
9:42 - What is life?
19:51 - Free will
33:56 - Simulation
36:06 - Base layer of reality
51:42 - Boston Dynamics
1:00:01 - Engineering consciousness
1:10:30 - Suffering
1:19:24 - Postmodernism
1:23:43 - Psychedelics
1:36:57 - GPT-3
1:45:40 - GPT-4
1:52:05 - OpenAI Codex
1:54:20 - Humans vs AI: Who is more dangerous?
2:11:04 - Hitler
2:16:01 - Autonomous weapon systems
2:23:29 - Mark Zuckerberg
2:29:04 - Love
2:43:18 - Michael Malice and anarchism
3:00:15 - Love
3:04:23 - Advice for young people
3:09:00 - Meaning of life

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I don't see where the awareness that we're aware, the hard problem doesn't feel like it's solved.

I mean, it's called a hard problem for a reason because it seems like there needs

Yeah, I think the major leap is to understand how it is possible that a machine can dream, that a physical system is able to create a representation that the physical system is acting on and that is spun force and so on.

But once you accept the fact that you are not in physics, but that you exist inside of the story, I think the mystery disappears.

Your consciousness is being written into the story.

The fact that you experience things is written to the story.

You ask yourself, is this real what I'm seeing?

And your brain writes into the story, yes, it's real.

So what about the perception of consciousness?

So the illusion of consciousness, the demonstration of consciousness, I ask for the legged robot, how do we make this legged robot conscious?

So there's 2 things, and maybe you can tell me if they're neighboring ideas.

1 is actually make it conscious, and the other is make it appear conscious to others.

What would it take to make you not conscious?

So when you are thinking about how you perceive the world, can you decide to switch from looking at qualia to looking at representational states?

There is a particular way in which you can look at the world and recognize its machine nature including your own.

And in that state, you don't have that conscious experience in this way anymore.

And I think this thing that you recognize everything as a representation, this is typically what we mean with enlightenment states.

the motivational level, but you can also do this on the experiential level, on the perceptual level.

See, but then I can come back to a conscious state.

Okay, I particularly, I'm referring to the social aspect that the demonstration of consciousness is a really nice thing at a party when you're trying to meet a new person.

It's a nice thing to know that they're conscious and they can, I don't know how fundamental consciousness is in human interaction, but it seems like to be at least an important part?

And I ask that in the same kind of way for robots.

You know, in order to create a rich, compelling human robot interaction, it feels like there needs to be elements of consciousness within that interaction.

We're able to have feedback about the fact that we are both acting on models of our own awareness.

The question is how hard is it for the robot, artificially created robot to achieve cat level in party tricks?

Yes, so the issue for me is currently not so much on how to build a system that creates a story about a robot that lives in the world, but to make an adequate representation of the world.

And the model that you and me have is a unified 1.

It's 1 where you basically make sense of everything that you can perceive.

Every feature in the world that enters your perception can be relationally mapped to a unified model of everything.

And we don't have an AI that is able to construct such a unified model yet.

So you need that unified model to do the party trick?

Yes, I think that it doesn't make sense if this thing is conscious, but not in the same universe as you, because you could not relate to each other.

So what's the process, would you say, of engineering consciousness in a machine?

So you probably want to have some kind of perceptual system.

This perceptual system is a processing agent that is able to track sensory data and predict the next frame and the sensory data from the previous frames of the sensory data and the current state of the system.

So the current state of the system is, in perception, instrumental to predicting what happens next.

this means you build lots and lots of functions that take all the blips that you feel on your skin and that you see on your retina or that you hear and puts them into a set of relationships that allows you to predict what kind of sensory data, what kind of sensor of blips, vector of blips, you're going to perceive in the next frame, right?

This is tuned and it's constantly tuned until it gets as accurate as it can.

You build a very accurate prediction mechanism that is step 1 of the perception.

So at first you predict, then you perceive and see the error in your prediction.

And you have to do 2 things to make that happen.

1 is you have to build a network of relationships that are constraints that take all the variants in the world, put each of the variances into a variable that is connected with relationships to other variables.

And these relationships are computable functions that constrain each other.

So when you see a nose that points in a certain direction in space, you have a constraint that says there should be a face nearby that has the same direction.

And if that is not the case, you have some kind of contradiction that you need to resolve because it's probably not a nose what you're looking at.

So you have to reinterpret the data until you get to a point where your model converges.

And this process of making the sensory data fit into your model structure is what Piaget calls the assimilation.

And accommodation is the change of the models, where you change your models such a way that you can assimilate everything.

So you're talking about building a hell of an awesome perception system that's able to do prediction and perception and correct and keep improving.

So the first thing that we wanted to do is we want to minimize the contradictions in the model.

And of course, it's very easy to make a model in which you minimize the contradictions just by allowing that it can be in many, many possible states, right?

So if you increase degrees of freedom, you will have fewer contradictions.

But you also want to reduce the degrees of freedom because degrees of freedom mean uncertainty.

You want your model to reduce uncertainty as much as possible.

So you have to have a trade-off between minimizing contradictions and reducing uncertainty.

And you have only a finite amount of compute and experimental time and effort available to reduce uncertainty in the world.

So you need to assign value to what you observe.

So you need some kind of motivational system that is estimating what you should be looking at and what you should be thinking about it, how you should be applying your resources to model what that is.

Right, so you need to have something like convergence links that tell you how to get from the present state of the model to the next 1.

You need to have these compatibility links that tell you which constraints exist and which constraint violations exist.

And you need to have some kind of motivational system that tells you what to pay attention to.

So now we have a second agent next to the perceptual agent.

This is a cybernetic system that is modeling what the system needs, what's important for the system, and that interacts with the perceptual system to maximize the expected reward.

And you're saying the motivational system is some kind of, like what is it, a higher level narrative over some lower level?

No, it's just your brainstem stuff, the limbic system stuff that tells you, okay, now you should get something to eat because I've just measured your blood sugar.

So you mean like Motivational system, like the lower level stuff, like hungry.

There's basically physiological needs and some cognitive needs and some social needs, and they all interact.

And they're all implemented at different parts in your nervous system as the motivational system, but they're basically cybernetic feedback loops.

And so you now have a motivational agent that makes your robot go for the ball or that makes your worm go to eat food and so on.

And you have the perceptual system that lets it predict the environment.

So it's able to solve that control problem to some degree.

And now what we learned is that it's very hard to build a machine learning system that looks at all the data simultaneously to see what kind of relationships could exist between them.

So you need to selectively model the world.

You need to figure out where can I make the biggest difference if I would put the following things together?

Sometimes you find a gradient for that, right?

When you have a gradient, you don't need to remember where you came from.

You just follow the gradient until it doesn't get any better.

But if you have a world where the problems are discontinuous and the search spaces are discontinuous.

You need to retain memory of what you explored.

You need to construct a plan of what to explore next.

And this thing means that you have, next to this perceptual construction system and the motivational cybernetics, an agent that is paying attention to what it should select at any given moment to maximize reward.

And this scanning system, this attention agent, is required for consciousness, and consciousness is its control model.

So it's the index memories that this thing retains when it manipulates the perceptual representations to maximize the value and minimize the conflicts and it to increase coherence.

So the purpose of consciousness is to create coherence in your perceptual representations, remove conflicts, predict the future, construct counterfactual representations so you can coordinate your actions and so on.

And in order to do this, it needs to form memories.

These memories are partial binding states of the working memory contents that are being revisited later on to backtrack, to undo certain states, to look for alternatives.

And these indexed memories that you can recall, that is what you perceive as your stream of consciousness.

And being able to recall these memories, this is what makes you conscious.

If you could not remember what you paid attention to, you wouldn't be conscious.

So consciousness is the index in the memory database.

But let me sneak up to the questions of consciousness a little further.

So we usually relate suffering to consciousness.

I think to me that's a really strong sign of consciousness, is a thing that can suffer.

And like in your model, what you just described, which is indexing of memories and what is the coherence with the perception, with this predictive thing that's going on in the perception?

How does suffering relate to any of that?

The higher level suffering that humans do?

Basically pain is a reinforcement signal.

It Pain is a signal that 1 part of your brain sends to another part of your brain, or in an abstract sense, part of your mind sends to another part of the mind to regulate its behavior, to tell it the behavior that you're currently exhibiting should be improved.

And this is the signal that I tell you to move away from what you're currently doing and push into a different direction.

So pain gives part of you an impulse to do something differently.

But sometimes this doesn't work because the training part of your brain is talking to the wrong region.

Or because it has the wrong model of the relationships in the world.

Maybe you're mismodeling yourself or you're mismodeling the relationship of yourself to the world or you're mismodeling the dynamics of the world.

So you're trying to improve something that cannot be improved by generating more pain.

But the system doesn't have any alternative.

What do you do if something doesn't get better and you want it to get better?

And when the signal becomes chronic, when it becomes permanent, without a change inside, this is what we call suffering.

And the purpose of consciousness is to deal with contradictions, with things that cannot be resolved.

The purpose of consciousness, I think, is similar to a conductor in an orchestra.

When everything works well, the orchestra doesn't need much of a conductor as long as it's coherent.

But when there is a lack of coherence or something is consistently producing disharmony and mismatches, then the conductor becomes alert and interacts with it.

So suffering attracts the activity of our consciousness.

And the purpose of that is ideally that we bring new layers online, new layers of modeling that are able to create a model of the dysregulation so we can deal with it.

And this means that we typically get higher level consciousness, so to speak, right?

We get some consciousness above our pay grade, maybe, if we have some suffering early in our life.

Most of the interesting people had trauma early on in their childhood.

And trauma means that you are suffering an injury for which the system is not prepared, which it cannot deal with, which it cannot insulate itself from, so something breaks.

And this means that the behavior of the system is permanently disturbed in a way that some mismatch exists now in the regulation, that just by following your impulse, by following the pain and the direction which it hurts, your situation doesn't improve but get worse.

And so what needs to happen is that you grow up.

And that's part that is grown up is able to deal with the part that is stuck in this earlier phase.

Yeah, so it leads to growth, adding extra layers to your cognition.

Let me ask you then, because I guess I guess take on suffering, the ethics of the whole thing.

So not our consciousness, but the consciousness of others.

You've tweeted, 1 of my biggest fears is that insects could be conscious.

The amount of suffering on earth would be unthinkable.

So when we think of other conscious beings, is suffering a property of consciousness that we're most concerned about?

So I'm still thinking about robots, how to make sense of other non-human things that appear to have the depth of experience that humans have.

And to me, that means consciousness and the darkest side of that, which is suffering, the capacity to suffer.

So I started thinking, how much responsibility do we have for those other conscious beings?

That's where the definition of consciousness becomes most urgent.

Like having to come up with a definition of consciousness becomes most urgent, is who should we and should we not be torturing?

It depends, right, on how you look at it.

Well, he drew a line somewhere where this is us and that's them.

It's like these, you don't have to use the word consciousness, but these are the things that matter to me if they suffer or not.

And these are the things that don't matter to

Yeah, but when 1 of his commanders failed him, he broke his spine and let him die in a horrible way.

And So in some sense, I think he was indifferent to suffering.

Or he was not indifferent in the sense that he didn't see it as useful if he inflicted suffering.

But he did not see it as something that had to be avoided.

The question was, how can I use suffering and the infliction of suffering to reach my goals from his perspective?

I see, so like different societies throughout history put different value on

the- Different individuals, different psyches, right?

But also even the objective of avoiding suffering.

Like some societies probably, I mean this is where like religious belief really helps.

That afterlife, that it doesn't matter that you suffer or die, what matters is you suffer honorably, right?

superstitious to me, basically beliefs that assert things for which no evidence exists.

Are incompatible with sound epistemology.

And I don't think that religion has to be superstitious, otherwise it should be condemned in all cases.

You're somebody who's saying we live in a dream world, we have 0 evidence for anything.

There are limits to what languages can be constructed.

Mathematics breaks solid evidence for its own structure.

And once we have some idea of what languages exist and how a system can learn and what learning itself is in the first place, and so on, we can begin to realize that our intuitions, that we are able to learn about the regularities of the world and minimize appraisal and understand the nature of our own agency to some degree of abstraction.

Just because we live in a dream world doesn't mean mathematics can't give us a consistent glimpse of physical, of objective reality.

We can basically distinguish useful encodings from useless encodings.

And when we apply our truth-seeking to the world, we know we usually cannot find out whether a certain thing is true.

What we typically do is we take the state vector of the universe, separate it into several objects that interact with each other, so interfaces, and this distinction that we are making is not completely arbitrary.

It's done to optimize the compression that we can apply to our models of the universe so we can predict what's happening with our limited resources.

But the separation of the world into objects that are somehow discrete and interacting with each other is not the true reality, right?

The boundaries between the objects are projected into the world, not arbitrarily projected, but still it's only an approximation of what's actually the case.

And we sometimes notice that we run into contradictions when we try to understand high-level things like economic aspects of the world and so on, or political aspects or psychological aspects where we make simplifications and the objects that we are using to separate the world are just 1 of many possible projections of what's going on.

And so it's not in this postmodernist sense, completely arbitrary and you're free to pick what you want or dismiss what you don't like because it's all stories.

You have to show for every model of how well it predicts the world.

So the confidence that you should have in the entities of your models should correspond to the evidence that you have.

Can I ask you on a small tangent to talk about your favorite set of ideas and people, which is postmodernism?

And why to you is it not a useful framework of thought?

Postmodernism is something that I'm really not an expert on.

And postmodernism is a set of philosophical ideas that is difficult to lump together, that is characterized by some useful thinkers, some of them post-structuralist and so on.

And I'm mostly not interested in it because I think that it's not leading me anywhere that I find particularly useful.

It's mostly, I think, born out of the insight that the ontologies that we impose on the world are not literally true, and that we can often get to a different interpretation by the world by using a different ontology that is a different separation of the world into interacting objects.

But the idea that this makes the world a set of stories that are arbitrary, I think, is wrong.

And the people that are engaging in this type of philosophy are working in an area that I largely don't find productive.

There's nothing useful coming out of this.

So this idea that truth is relative is not something that has in some sense informed physics or theory of relativity, and there is no feedback between those.

There is no meaningful influence of this type of philosophy on the sciences or on engineering or on politics.

But there is a very strong information of this on ideology because it basically has become an ideology that is justifying itself by the notion that truth is a relative concept.

And it's not being used in such a way that the philosophers or sociologists that take up these ideas say, oh, I should doubt my own ideas because maybe my separation of the world into objects is not completely valid and I should maybe use a different 1 and be open to a pluralism of ideas.

But it mostly exists to dismiss the ideas of other people.

It becomes, yeah, it becomes a political weapon of sorts

Basically, there's nothing wrong, I think, with developing a philosophy around this.

But to develop norms around the idea that truth is something that is completely negotiable is incompatible with the scientific project.

And I think if the academia has no defense against the ideological parts of the postmodernist movement, it's doomed.

Right, you have to acknowledge the ideological part of any movement, actually, including postmodernism.

And to me, an ideology is basically a viral memeplex that is changing your mind in such a way that reality gets warped.

It gets warped in such a way that you're being cut off from the rest of human thought space.

And you cannot consider things outside of the range of ideas of your own ideology as possibly true.

Right, so I mean there's certain properties to an ideology that make it harmful.

1 of them is that like dogmatism of just certainty, dogged certainty in that you're right, you have the truth, and nobody else does.

Yeah, but what is creating the certainty?

It's very interesting to look at the type of model that is being produced.

And you tell people, oh, this idea that you consider to be very true, the evidence for this is actually just much weaker than you thought and look here at some studies.

It's usually normative, which means some thoughts are unthinkable because they would change your identity into something that is no longer acceptable.

And this cuts you off from considering an alternative.

And many de facto religions use this trick to lock people into a certain mode of thought.

This removes agency over your own thoughts.

It's basically not just a process of domestication, but it's actually an intellectual castration that happens.

It's an inability to think creatively and to bring forth new thoughts.

Can I ask you about substances, chemical substances that affect the video game, the dream world, so psychedelics, that increasingly have been getting a lot of research done on them?

So in general, psychedelics, psilocybin, MDMA, but also a really interesting 1, the big 1, which is DMT.

What and where are the places that these substances take the mind that is operating in the dream world?

Do you have an interesting sense how this throws a wrinkle into the prediction model?

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Joscha Bach: Nature of Reality, Dreams, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #212