Joscha Bach is the VP of Research at the AI Foundation, previously doing research at MIT and Harvard. Joscha work explores the workings of the human mind, intelligence, consciousness, life on Earth, and the possibly-simulated fabric of our universe.

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Incredible comment by ernst.gemeint showing some of the topics mentioned: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM&lc=UgzzoW0z_tyeLyatEJB4AaABAg

EPISODE LINKS:
Joscha's Twitter: https://twitter.com/Plinz
Joscha's Website: http://bach.ai/

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
3:14 - Reverse engineering Joscha Bach
10:38 - Nature of truth
18:47 - Original thinking
23:14 - Sentience vs intelligence
31:45 - Mind vs Reality
46:51 - Hard problem of consciousness
51:09 - Connection between the mind and the universe
56:29 - What is consciousness
1:02:32 - Language and concepts
1:09:02 - Meta-learning
1:16:35 - Spirit
1:18:10 - Our civilization may not exist for long
1:37:48 - Twitter and social media
1:44:52 - What systems of government might work well?
1:47:12 - The way out of self-destruction with AI
1:55:18 - AI simulating humans to understand its own nature
2:04:32 - Reinforcement learning
2:09:12 - Commonsense reasoning
2:15:47 - Would AGI need to have a body?
2:22:34 - Neuralink
2:27:01 - Reasoning at the scale of neurons and societies
2:37:16 - Role of emotion
2:48:03 - Happiness is a cookie that your brain bakes for itself

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The following is a conversation with Yosha Bach, VP of Research at the AI Foundation with a history of research positions at MIT and Harvard.

Yosha is 1 of the most unique and brilliant people in the artificial intelligence community, exploring the workings of the human mind, intelligence, consciousness, life on earth, and the possibly simulated fabric of our universe.

I could see myself talking to Yosha many times in the future.

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This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

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And now, here's my conversation with Joscha Bach.

As you've said, you grew up in a forest in East Germany, just as we were talking about off mic, to parents who were artists.

And now I think, at least to me, you've become 1 of the most unique thinkers in the AI world.

So can we try to reverse engineer your mind a little bit?

What were the key philosophers, scientists, ideas, maybe even movies, or just realizations that had an impact on you when you were growing up that kind of led to the trajectory, or were the key sort of crossroads in the trajectory of your intellectual development?

My father came from a long tradition of architects, distant branch of the Bach family.

And so basically he was technically a nerd and nerds need to interface in society with non-standard ways.

Sometimes I define a nerd as somebody who thinks that the purpose of communication is to submit your ideas to peer review.

And Normal people understand that the primary purpose of communication is to negotiate alignment, and these purposes tend to conflict, which means that nerds have to learn how to interact with society at large.

Who is the reviewer in the nerd's view of communication?

So whatever hapless individual is around, well, you would try to make him or her the gift of information.

Okay, so you're, now by the way, my research will malinform me.

So he did study architecture, but basically my grandfather made the wrong decision.

He married an aristocrat and was drawn into the war.

So basically, my father was not parented by a nerd, but by somebody who tried to tell him what to do and expected him to do what he was told.

He's unable to do things if he's not intrinsically motivated.

So in some sense, my grandmother broke her son and her son responded by, when he became an architect, to become an artist.

So he built 100 Wasser architecture, he built houses without right angles.

He'd build lots of things that didn't work in the more brutalist traditions of Eastern Germany.

And so he bought an old water mill, moved out to the countryside and did only what he wanted to do, which was art.

Eastern Germany was perfect for Bohem because you had complete material safety, put was heavily subsidized, health care was free, you didn't have to worry about rent or pensions or anything.

the other thing is it was almost impossible not to be in political disagreement with your government, which is very productive for artists.

So everything that you do is intrinsically meaningful because it will always touch on the deeper currents of society, of culture, and be in conflict with it and tension with it.

And you will always have to define yourself with respect to this.

So what impacted your father, this outside-of-the-box thinker against the government, against the world artists?

He was somebody who only got self-aware to the degree that he needed to make himself functional.

So in some sense, he was also in the late 1960s, and he was in some sense a hippie.

He lived out there in his kingdom, he built big sculpture gardens and started many avenues of art and so on, and convinced a woman to live with him.

She was also an architect and she adored him and decided to share her life with him.

And I basically grew up in a big cave full of books.

It was very, very beautiful, very quiet, and quite lonely.

And by the time I came to school, I've read everything until fourth grade and then some.

And there was not a real way for me to relate to the outside world.

And I couldn't quite put my finger on why.

And today I know it was because I was a nerd, obviously, and I was the only nerd around.

And there was nobody interested in physics or computing or mathematics and so on.

And this village school that I went to was basically a nice school.

Kids were nice to me, I was not beaten up, but I also didn't make many friends or build deep relationships.

They only happened in starting from ninth grade when I went into a school for mathematics and physics.

Do you remember any key books from this moment?

So I went to the library and I worked my way through the children's and young adult sections and then I read a lot of science fiction.

For instance, Danis Laflamme, basically the great author of cybernetics, has influenced me.

Back then, I didn't see him as a big influence because everything that he wrote seemed to be so natural to me.

It's only later that I contrasted it with what other people wrote.

Another thing that was very influential on me were the classical philosophers and also the literature of Romanticism.

So German poetry and art, Drozdo Hilshoff and Heine and up to Hesse and so on.

So at which point do the classical philosophers end?

At this point, we're in the 21st century, what's the latest classical philosopher?

Does this stretch through even as far as Nietzsche or is this, are we talking about Plato and Aristotle?

I think that Nietzsche is the classical equivalent of a shit poster.

easy to read, but he's not so much trolling others, he's trolling himself because he was at odds with the world.

Largely his romantic relationships didn't work out.

He got angry and he basically became a nihilist.

Isn't that a beautiful way to be as an intellectual is to constantly be trolling yourself, to be in that conflict and that, no, in the tension?

At some point, you have to understand the comedy of your own situation.

If you take yourself seriously, and you are not functional, it ends in tragedy, as it did for Nietzsche.

I think you think he took himself too seriously in that tension.

And you find the same thing in Hesse and so on.

This Steppenwolf syndrome is classic adolescence, where you basically feel misunderstood by the world and you don't understand that all the misunderstandings are the result of your own lack of self-awareness.

Because you think that you are a prototypical human and the others around you should behave the same way as you expect them based on your innate instincts and it doesn't work out.

And you become a transcendentalist to deal with that.

So it's very, very understandable and I have great sympathies for this to the degree that I can have sympathy for my own intellectual history.

So as an intellectual, a life well lived, a journey well traveled is 1 where you don't take yourself seriously.

No, I think that you are neither serious or not serious yourself, because you need to become unimportant as a subject, that is, if you are a philosopher, belief is not a verb.

You don't do this for the audience, you don't do it for yourself.

You have to submit to the things that are possibly true and you have to follow wherever your inquiry leads, but it's not about you, it has nothing to do with you.

So do you think then people like Ayn Rand believed sort of in the idea of there's objective truth, so what's your sense in the philosophical, if you remove yourself as objective from the picture, you think it's possible to actually discover ideas that are true or are we just in a mesh of relative concepts that are neither true nor false?

You cannot define objective truth without understanding the nature of truth in the first place.

So what does the brain mean by saying that it discovers something as truth?

So for instance, a model can be predictive or not predictive.

Then there can be a sense in which a mathematical statement can be true because it's defined as true under certain conditions.

So it's basically a particular state that a variable can have in a symbol game.

And then you can have a correspondence between systems and talk about truth, which is again a type of model correspondence.

And there also seems to be a particular kind of ground truth.

So for instance, you're confronted with the enormity of something existing at all, right?

It's stunning when you realize something exists rather than nothing.

There's an absolute truth in the fact that something seems to be happening.

I could just think about that idea and be amazed by that idea for the rest of my life and not go any farther, because I don't even know the answer to that.

Well, the easiest answer is existence is the default, right, so this is the lowest number of bits that you would need to

The simplest answer to this is that existence is the default.

What about non-existence, I mean, that seems...

Non-existence might not be a meaningful notion in this sense.

So in some sense, if everything that can exist exists, for something to exist, it probably needs to be implementable.

The only thing that can be implemented is finite automata, so maybe the whole of existence is the superposition of all finite automata, and we are in some region of the fractal that has the properties that it can contain us.

What does it mean to be a superposition of finite?

So I understood, superposition of all possible rules.

Imagine that every automaton is basically an operator that acts on some substrate, and as a result you get emergent patterns.

It's something that can store information.

Something that can store information, there's a Tomatina.

Still, doesn't make sense to me the why that exists at all.

I could just sit there with a beer or a vodka and just enjoy the fact, pondering the why.

This might be the wrong direction to ask into this.

So there could be no relation in the Y direction without asking for a purpose or for a cause.

It doesn't mean that everything has to have a purpose or a cause, right?

So we mentioned some philosophers in that early, just taking a brief step back into that.

Okay, so we asked ourselves when did classical philosophy end?

I think for Germany, it largely ended with the first revolution.

That's basically when we think- Which one's that?

This was when we ended the monarchy and started a democracy.

And at this point, we basically came up with a new form of government that didn't have a good sense of this new organism that society wanted to be.

And in a way, it decapitated the universities.

So the universities went on through modernism like a headless chicken.

At the same time, democracy failed in Germany and we got fascism as a result.

And it burned down things in a similar way as Stalinism burned down intellectual traditions in Russia.

And Germany, both Germanys have not recovered from this.

Eastern Germany had this vulgar dialectic materialism and Western Germany didn't get much more edgy than Habermas.

So in some sense, both countries lost their intellectual traditions and killing off and driving out the Jews didn't help.

Yeah, so that was the end of really rigorous, what you would say is classical philosophy.

There's also this thing that in some sense, the low-hanging fruits in philosophy were mostly wrapped.

And the last big things that we discovered was the constructivist turn in mathematics.

So to understand that the parts of mathematics that work are computation.

There was a very significant discovery in the first half of the 20th century.

And it hasn't fully permeated philosophy and even physics yet.

Physicists checked out the code libraries for mathematics before constructivism became universal.

What, are you referring to Gödel's incompleteness theorem, that kind of, those kinds

So basically, Gödel himself, I think, didn't get it yet.

Hilbert saw that, for instance, Kantor's set-theoretic experiments in mathematics led into contradictions, and he noticed that with the current semantics, we cannot build a computer in mathematics that runs mathematics without crashing.

And so what Gödel could show is, using classical mathematical semantics, you run into contradictions.

And because Gödel strongly believed in these semantics, and more than in what he could observe and so on, he was shocked.

It basically shook his world to the core, because in some sense he felt that the world has to be implemented in classical mathematics.

I think that Turing could see that the solution is to understand that mathematics was computation all along, which means, For instance, pi in classical mathematics is a value.

It's also a function, but it's the same thing.

In computation, a function is only a value when you can compute it.

And if you cannot compute the last digit of pi, you only have a function.

You can plug this function into your local sun, let it run until the sun burns out, this is it, this is the last digit of pi you will know.

But it also means there can be no process in the physical universe or in any physically realized computer that depends on having known the last digit of pi.

Which means there are parts of physics that are defined in such a way that cannot strictly be true because assuming that this could be true leads into contradictions.

So I think putting computation at the center of the worldview is actually the right way to think about it.

Yes, and Wittgenstein could see it, And Wittgenstein basically preempted the logitist program of AI that Minsky started later, like 30 years later.

Turing was actually a pupil of Wittgenstein.

I didn't know there's any connection between

Wittgenstein even canceled some classes when Turing was not present because he thought it was not worth spending the time on with the others.

And if you read the Tractatus, it's a very beautiful book, like basically 1 thought on 75 pages.

It's very non-typical for philosophy because it doesn't have arguments in it and it doesn't have references in it.

It's just 1 thought that is not intending to convince anybody.

He says, it's mostly for people that had the same insight as me.

And this insight is, there is a way in which mathematics and philosophy ought to meet.

Mathematics tries to understand the domain of all languages by starting with those that are so formalizable that you can prove all the properties of the statements that you make.

But the price that you pay is that your language is very, very simple, So it's very hard to say something meaningful in mathematics.

And it looks complicated to people, but it's far less complicated than what our brain is casually doing all the time.

So it's mostly starting from natural languages, vaguely defined concepts.

And the hope is that mathematics and philosophy can meet at some point.

And Wittgenstein was trying to make them meet.

And he already understood that, for instance, you could express everything with the Nand calculus, that you could reduce the entire logic to Nand gates, as we do in our modern computers.

So in some sense, he already understood Turing universality before Turing spelled it out.

I think when he wrote the Tractatus, he didn't understand yet that the idea was so important and significant.

And I suspect then when Turing wrote it out, Nobody cared that much.

Turing was not that famous when he lived.

It was mostly his work in decrypting the German codes that made him famous or gave him some notoriety.

But this saint status that he has to computer science right now in the AI is something that I think he could acquire later.

Do you think of computation and computer science, and you kind of represent that to me, is maybe that's the modern day, you in a sense are the new philosopher by sort of the computer scientist who dares to ask the bigger questions that philosophy originally started, is the new philosopher?

I'm mostly still this child that grows up in a very beautiful valley and looks at the world from the outside and tries to understand what's going on.

And my teachers tell me things and they largely don't make sense.

I have to discover the foundations of what the others are saying.

I have to try to fix them, to be charitable.

I try to understand what they must have thought originally or what their teachers or their teachers' teachers must have thought until everything got lost in translation and how to make sense of the reality that we are in.

And whenever I have an original idea, I'm usually late to the party by say 400 years.

And the only thing that's good is that the parties get smaller and smaller, the older I get and the more I explore.

So it seems like 1 of the key qualities of your upbringing was that you were not tethered, whether it's because of your parents, or in general, maybe something within your mind, some genetic material, that you were not tethered to the ideas of the general populace, which is actually a unique property.

We're kind of, you know, the education system and whatever, not education system, just existing in this world forces a certain sets of ideas onto you.

Why were you, why are you not so tethered?

Even in your work today, you seem to not care about perhaps a best paper in Europe's, right?

Being tethered to particular things that current today in this year, people seem to value as a thing you put on your CV and resume.

You're a little bit more outside of that world, outside of the world of ideas that people are especially focusing, the benchmarks of today, the things.

And if there were more people like that, we might be able to solve some of the bigger problems that sort of AI dreams to solve.

And there's a big danger in this, because in a way you are expected to marry into an intellectual tradition, and visit this tradition into a particular school.

If everybody comes up with their own paradigms, the whole thing is not cumulative as an enterprise.

So in some sense, you need a healthy balance.

You need paradigmatic thinkers, and you need people that work within given paradigms.

Basically, scientists today define themselves largely by methods.

And it's almost a disease that we think as a scientist, somebody who was convinced by their guidance counselor that they should join a particular discipline and then they find a good mentor

learn the right methods and then they are lucky enough and privileged enough to join the right team and then their name will show up on influential papers.

But we also see that there are diminishing returns with this approach.

And when our field, computer science and AI, started, most of the people that joined this field had interesting opinions.

And today's thinkers in AI either don't have interesting opinions at all, or these opinions are inconsequential for what they're actually doing.

Because what they're doing is, they apply the state-of-the-art methods with a small epsilon.

And This is often a good idea if you think that this is the best way to make progress.

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Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality | Lex Fridman Podcast #101