Joscha Bach - Collected Quotes

"For all practical purposes, the universe is a pattern generator, and the mind 'makes sense' of these patterns by encoding them according to the regularities it can find. Thus, the representation of a concept in an intelligent system is not a pointer to a 'thing in reality', but a set of hierarchical constraints over (for instance perceptual) data." (Joscha Bach, "Seven Principles of Synthetic Intelligence", 2008)

"[...] motivation [...] does not arise from intelligence itself, but from a motivational system underlying all directed behavior." (Joscha Bach, "Seven Principles of Synthetic Intelligence", 2008)

"[…] the quality of a world model eventually does not amount to how 'truly' it depicts 'reality' , but how adequately it encodes the (sensory) patterns." (Joscha Bach, "Seven Principles of Synthetic Intelligence", 2008)

"Symbolic reasoning falls short not only in modeling low level behaviors but is also difficult to ground into real world interactions and to scale upon dynamic environments […] This has lead many […] to abandon symbolic systems […] and […]  focus on parallel distributed, entirely sub-symbolic approaches […] well suited for many learning and control tasks, but difficult to apply [in] areas such as reasoning and language." (Joscha Bach, "Principles of Synthetic Intelligence PSI: An Architecture of Motivated Cognition", 2009)

"The goal of building cognitive architectures is to achieve an understanding of mental processes by constructing testable information processing models." (Joscha Bach, "Principles of Synthetic Intelligence PSI: An Architecture of Motivated Cognition", 2009)

"Deep learning is about using a stacked hierarchy of feature detectors. [...] we use pattern detectors and we build them into networks that are arranged in hundreds of layers and then we adjust the links between these layers, usually using some kind of gradient descent." (Joscha Bach, "Joscha: Computational Meta-Psychology", 2015)

"For a long time people have thought that the universe is written in mathematics […] In fact nothing is mathematical. Mathematics is just the domain of formal languages. It doesn't exist. Mathematics starts with a void. Just throw in a few axioms and if those are nice axioms, then you get infinite complexity. Most of it is not computable. In mathematics you can express arbitrary statements, because it's all about formal languages. Many of these statements will not make sense. Many of these statements will make sense in some way, but you cannot test whether they make sense because they're not computable." (Joscha Bach, "Joscha: Computational Meta-Psychology", 2015)

"Mathematics is the domain of all formal languages, and allows the expression of arbitrary statements (most of which are uncomputable). Computation may be understood in terms of computational systems, for instance via defining states (which are sets of discernible differences, i.e. bits), and transition functions that let us derive new states." (Joscha Bach, "The Cortical Conductor Theory: Towards Addressing Consciousness in AI Models", 2017)

"Whereas mathematics is the realm of specification, computation is the realm of implementation; it captures all those systems that can actually be realized." (Joscha Bach, "The Cortical Conductor Theory: Towards Addressing Consciousness in AI Models", 2017)

"Computational systems are machines that can be described apriori and systematically, and implemented on every substrate that elicits the causal properties that are necessary to capture the respective states and transition functions." (Joscha Bach, "The Cortical Conductor Theory: Towards Addressing Consciousness in AI Models", 2017)