Joscha Bach
94 quotes
Biography
Joscha Bach is a German cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher known for his work on cognitive architectures, artificial intelligence, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, multi-agent systems, and philosophy of mind. His research aims to bridge cognitive science and AI by studying how human intelligence and consciousness can be modeled computationally.
"When the Artificial Intelligence (AI) movement set off fifty years ago, it bristled with ideas and optimism, which have arguably both waned since. The field has regressed into a multitude of relatively well insulated domains like logics, neural learning, case based reasoning, artificial life, robotics, agent technologies, semantic web... each with their own goals and methodologies. The decline of the idea of studying intelligence per se, as opposed to designing systems that perform tasks that would require some measure of intelligence in humans, has progressed to such a degree that we must now rename the original AI idea into Artificial General Intelligence."
"Attempts in psychology at overarching theories of the mind have been all but shattered by the influence of behaviorism, and where cognitive psychology has sprung up in its tracks, it rarely acknowledges that there is something as "intelligence per se", as opposed to the individual performance of a group of subjects in an isolated set of experiments."
"AI’s gradual demotion from a science of the mind to the nerdy playpen of engineering was accompanied not by utterances of disappointment, but by a chorus of glee, uniting those wary of human technological hubris with the same factions of society that used to oppose evolutionary theory or materialistic monism..."
"Long ago, physics and other natural sciences... had become computational."
"MicroPsi is a cognitive model that represents the author’s attempt to contribute to the discussion of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)..."
"[W]e are in need of functionalist architectures. That is, we need to make explicit what entities we are going to research, what constitutes these entities conceptually, and how we may capture these concepts."
"Early AI systems tended to constrain themselves to micro-domains that could be sufficiently described using simple ontologies and binary predicate logics, or restricted themselves to hand-coded ontologies altogether. ...AI systems will probably have to be perceptual symbol systems, as opposed to amodal symbol systems..."
"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."
"[T]he quality of a world model eventually does not amount to how "truly" it depicts "reality", but how adequately it encodes the (sensory) patterns."
"Robots are... not going to be the singular route to achieving AGI, and successfully building robots that are performing well in a physical environment does not necessarily engender the solution of the problems of AGI. Whether robotics or virtual agents will be first to succeed in the quest of achieving AGI remains an open question."
"General intelligence is not only the ability to reach a given goal (and usually, there is some very specialized, but non-intelligent way to reach a singular fixed goal, such as winning a game of chess), but includes the setting of novel goals, and most important of all, about exploration. ...[A]n environment with fixed tasks, scaled by an agent with pre-defined goals is not going to make a good benchmark problem for AGI."
"[M]otivation... does not arise from intelligence itself, but from a motivational system underlying all directed behavior. ...[T]here is no reason that could let us take behavioral tendencies such as self-preservation, energy conservation, altruistic behavior for granted—they... have... to be designed [including by evolutionary methods] into the system..."
"Because a naked ontological dualism between mind and body/world is notoriously hard to defend, it is sometimes covered up by wedging the popular notion of emergence into the "explanatory gap"... "strong emergence" is basically an anti-AI proposal."
"In cognitive science, we currently have two major families of architectures... One, the classical school... characterized as Fodorian Architectures, as... the manipulation of a language of thought, usually expressed as a set of rules and capable of . ...The other family favors distributed approaches and constrains a dynamic system with potentially astronomically many until... behaviors [of] general intelligence are left. This may seem more "natural" and well-tuned... Yet many functional aspects of intelligence... as planning and language, are... much harder to depict using the dynamical systems approach."
"MicroPsi is an implementation of ’s Psi theory... MicroPsi is an attempt to embody the principles discussed above..."
"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.<!--Introduction/Draft p. i-->"
"[D]espite inevitable difficulties and methodological problems, the design of unified architectures modeling the breadth of mental capabilities in a single system is a crucial stage in understanding the human mind...<!--Introduction/Draft p. i-->"
"[T]he designer of a unified architecture is in a similar situation as the cartographers that set out to draw the first maps of the world, based on the reports of traders and explorers returning from expeditions into uncharted waters and journeys to unknown coasts.<!--Introduction/Draft p. ii-->"
"[T]aking [the design of a cognitive architecture] to the AI laboratory... requires the theory not merely to be plausible, but... requires it to be fit for implementation, and delivers it to the... merciless battle of testing.<!--Introduction/Draft p. iii-->"
"This book is an attempt to explain cognition—thought, perception, emotion, experience—in terms of a machine, that is, using a cognitive architecture.<!--p. 3-->"
"Cognitive architectures are... Leibnizian machines... designed to bring forth the feats of cognition, and built to allow us to enter... examine them, and to watch their individual parts... pushing and pulling... thereby explaining how a mind works.<!--p. 3-->"
"Our... cognitive architecture is based on a formal [psychological] theory... the PSI theory... [which] has been turned into a computational model... MicroPSI... partially implemented as a computer program.<!--p. 4-->"
"[T]he relationship between cognition and neurobiological processes might be similar to the one between a car engine and locomotion. ...[A] car's locomotion is facilitated mainly by its engine, but the understanding of the engine does not aid much in finding out where the car goes. ...[T]he integration of... parts, the intentions of the driver and even the terrain might be more crucial ...<!--p. 5-->"
"Because there is no narrow, concise understanding of what constitutes mental activity and what is part of mental processes... cognition, the cognitive sciences and the related notions span a wide and convoluted terrain... most of [which] lies outside psychology... This methodological discrepancy can only be understood in the context of the recent .<!--p. 6-->"
"Behaviorism... in the form of ... not only neglected the nature of mental entities as an object of inquiry, but denied their existence...<!--p. 7-->"