From Language to Consciousness (Guest: Joscha Bach)

Guest lecture by Joscha Bach on the past and future of language models.

[@buh357]

when joscha bach talk, i listen

[@matthewshaw2850]

@Buh facts

[@Embolder]

Infinitely out of my depth but so compelling.

[@Aquietdreamer11]

Someone on the the lex Fridman podcast said “ talking with Joshua, is like the directors cut of the conversation with the architect”

[@alikhudiyev]

Even he listens to himself while talking.

[@keeperofthelight9681]

You are a very wise man @buh please tell me more. I think I have much to learn from you

[@looseunit9180]

This is one of the most mind expanding presentations ever. It is impossible to see “reality” the same way afterwards… thank you for uploading

[@milesteg8627]

Excited for the listen, a good primer I'm sure ✌️

[@joao_aguilera]

Oh Bach I could not express how listening to your thoughts is extremely valuable to me. As a Data Engineer I feel exactly what I am, a contemporary plumber. But only being able to understand your way of seeing the world, and be able to relate, and to think what in the deep, I already knew, but had not the intelligence to put into words is somehow more than enough to me. A pleasure as usual. Thank you

[@steveruqus2680]

I've been working my way back through podcasts with @JoschaBach, but I wish I had started here because I sense it's the Genesis of everything that follows. Thank you for posting.

[@thecomputingbrain2663]

Thank you for thanking me =]. And yes, it is no doubt one of the most structured expositions of Joscha's thought -- the podcasts are also great, but in here he builds it from scratch.

[@geofry642]

Joscha Bach is the smartest person I know

[@robocop30301]

Don't understand how there is only 15k views when I've watched this 7000 times.

[@nosurrender2192]

It is always a pleasure to follow Joscha's thoughts, ideas and explanations in this way. Great job guys!👍 "Joscha is one of the best people on the planet doing the really deep difficult profound thinking about the foundations of cognition understanding in the mind of the world that we need to solve the remaining problems between here and the creation of agi" Ben Goertzel

[@isaacmackey8604]

The question about 2:02:48 starts a mini-lecture about reading Genesis from the Bible "with correct epistemology" (2:06:50) and Bach's 6-stage theory of conscious experience and personal development. This is the most insane and brilliant sequence of ideas I've heard in a long time.

[@christopherhamilton3621]

Indeed: compelling & quite genius. I honestly believe he’s right.

[@alexoid951]

thank you guys, for giving me something to listen to and to try to understand for the rest of my life

[@OfCourseICan]

Joscha is the reason I am alive today after overcoming a supposed terminal / debilitating ilness 12 years ago. Is thank you enough?❤

[@qhansen123]

How?

[@haniamritdas4725]

Okay so Bach here 1:42:18 recapitulates the empirical philosophy of the self and the higher mind articulated by the ancient yoga lineages, ashtanga and Buddhist too. Quite a thrill to watch that happen.

[@PaulHigginbothamSr]

I simply love the way Yasha ties all modern thinkers together. It is awesome Yasha's intellect. Scarey smart. Not normal. Only those holding aloft the flame shows the path to follow in the dark. I thought in 86 that only large quick data flows could show thought. What needs to happen is to map in a dolphin's brain how it optimizes echo returns into clear pictures of reality objects. This mental train can be made in silicon to represent the neuronal flow from inception to mental picture. Very rapid large scale ai sensors can delimit this flow. Statistically.

[@MalAnders94]

Joscha is incredible. In the good way.

[@s33light]

Always great to hear Joscha present. I enjoyed the historical parts at the beginning. Some questionable claims near the end: Most legitimate astrologers do use epistemological methods. They keep records of events and birth charts and study them constantly. That's how they learn not only what the archetypes are really about and how they relate, but why. My studies of numerology and astrology spanned many years of obsessively collecting data from the real world and poring over the relationships, often marveling at both the glaringly obvious and profoundly subtle patterns, as well as the lack of counterfactual noise. Often important looking transits do not appear to correlate with any obvious historical or autobiographical events, but important historical and autobiographical events always seem to correlate to the appropriate looking transits. After that, at around 2:08, it is proposed that God/Creative Spirit discovers how to make light (really contrast) by "getting oscillations out of the neurons in a targeted way and associating the intensity with brightness and the flatness with darkness." This is not a story of how visible qualia was created, but rather a story about how already detected biochemical/electrochemical intensities are *associated* with already existing and detected contrasts of visible qualia. It's an unintentional sleight of hand or bait and switch. The explanatory gap and hard problem are miniaturized so that they can be overlooked.

[@Telencephelon]

Can you please upload or host more of these talks. This is something that actually answers things and is provable under the subset of examples given. Also just like Joscha, I think it is hard for people to subscribe to his hypothesis until you had an absolute clear lucid dream. I never did drugs. I guess that is another way, that is dangerous though. He talks about a game engine because that is what it really looks like. It's my choice of description of my own experience 12 years back

[@uwepleban3784]

One small note on the anecdote about the genesis of the lambda symbol. There is a brief KZbin video in which Dana Scott, who did his PhD under Alonzo Church in 1958, points out that the typesetting story is bogus (“a completely false story”), and asks his students not to spread it any further. The video is called “Dana Scott on lambda notation”, dated 13 May 2016. He also explains where the lambda operator comes from.

[@simonmasters3295]

Hats Off then for the Lamba meme? 😂🎉🎉🎉

[@jondor654]

The employment of lambda must enjoy good provenance.

[@mznxbcv12345]

everything after 52:00 is nonsense anyways

[@CopperKettle]

Thank you, cheers from Yekaterinburg

[@Di5functi0n3l_playp3n]

Excellent talk. Wonderful in every respect. Thank you.

[@teemukupiainen3684]

Amen.

[@marshacd]

A transcript would be very useful.

[@bobaldo2339]

Yes. I find it difficult to understand him. Reading a transcript would be easier.

[@rpcruz]

You can enable the subtitles. They work quite well.

[@jondor654]

Clear presentation and enjoyable

[@Gotchaaaaaa]

Joscha Bach; The new best Bach

[@mattvm00]

Joscha is my chancellor.

[@snarkyboojum]

TL;DR -> This video explores the development of artificial intelligence, from the imagery debate in cognitive science in the 1980s to the discovery of the transformer algorithm in 2017. It explains how language can be formalized and how it is related to computation, as well as the Church-Turing thesis, the Game of Life, and the Chomsky Hierarchy. It also discusses how the brain works and how it can be used to create an embedding space, and introduces the Generative Pre-Train Transformer (GPT3) algorithm. Finally, it suggests building a GPT-3 robot that is able to learn and discover itself, and discusses the concept of a "language of thought" which is a universal language.

[@liminal6823]

You had me at the Gödel thumbnail

[@haniamritdas4725]

"Stack overflow for robots". Yes. The divide by zero "problem" is a feature of projective geometry relating "horizon" infinities to zero -- it has always irritated me that a calculator will spit out the symbol "Undefined" for this problem, when it is the only situation that produces the output. It has been defined, as undefined. So just define it as a new question. I love Joscha's mind.

[@simonmasters3295]

in case BIT(X) is defined if defined as "undefined" then GOTO unravel Meh, your insight is better

[@simonmasters3295]

"it is the situation that produces the output" (?result)... I sense the situation is one in which a term is used that has "been defined as undefined" and the Markov Blanket has been torn

[@haniamritdas4725]

@@simonmasters3295 not sure if there is a question or just a comment in your reply, but yeah I meant that the only time you get "UNDEF" as the output is the situation where the denominator evaluates to zero. So it's a definition. A lookup table result. Are you familiar with L'Hôpital's rule?

[@NightmareCourtPictures]

Yes totally agree. I interpret it differently though which is that in projective geometry infinities are describing an essential equivalence between the two “seemingly” different geometries…like how the 2d plane at infinity is equivalent to a 3d sphere…these two objects are just different perspective of the same underlying universal shape that can’t be described by the language itself. Cheers,

[@haniamritdas4725]

@@NightmareCourtPictures I am unfamiliar with the equivalence you mentioned. Is the 3d sphere one of infinite radius, I presume? It reminds me of the assertion that a slice of the relativistic light cone of an observer unfurls the edge of the cone into a 3d representation of the space at that moving point of time. I haven't unpacked the math there either, but I suspect that the object you have said cannot be described by the language itself is a higher-dimensional spinor? A hyperdimensional twistor? Something like that. Sow the wind to grow a whirlwind. But I think if we cannot describe it in the language, then that points to our own lack of understanding rather than a characteristic of the object...

[@paxdriver]

Lol wow Bach is hardcore eh? One bathroom break per 8hrs! he's so smart he assumes everyone can absorb this material like water without any of it leaking out 😜 too funny

[@Di5functi0n3l_playp3n]

1:59:19 the language to which he's reffering already exists and we call it "imagination" and it is from that superposition that everything we see here comes... including and especially, ourselves.

[@konstantinosmei]

When he says "linear" he means continuous. Polynomials are nonlinear, for example, but they are not linear in general.

[@guillermobrand8458]

From the life experience that my dog has had with the Postman, he has in his brain a Biography of the Postman. By the way, his brain also manages a biography of me. When I get home and when he sees me, he perceives that I am in a bad mood, "conveniently" memories are activated in his brain that, forming part of the biography that he has of me, allow him to project eventual future states, and he stays away from me. I usually don't show up in a bad mood, and then he pounces on me and howls with joy. The adult brain manages multiple biographies. Unlike my dog's brain, not all the biographies my brain manages correspond to “material” entities. Indeed, I still have, after many decades, a coherent biography of Little Red Hood. The most relevant biography that my brain administers is the one that is generated in childhood, with the learning of language, and that arises as a consequence of what those around me say about me. Said entity is what we know as the Being, whose action is “conscious action”. If you want to know more details, please let me know.

[@simonmasters3295]

I like the way guillemot whatever writes...my mind is awash with thought

[@guillermobrand8458]

@@simonmasters3295 Living beings with a brain, based on the information that they “capture” from their relevant material environment through their senses, manage a utilitarian mental representation of their environment. In turn, the interests of the material body are "protected" by an entity that, for practical purposes, "comes alive" in the brain. In the case of humans, we will call the aforementioned entity "the monkey that inhabits us." All this takes place in "an unconscious world", a world that turns out to be made up of Information, information "stored" in memories, memories made up of groups of neurons. The life experience, which takes place in the Present, incorporates new information. The information that is captured through the senses activates memories that previously participated in a previous life experience. Through the mechanism that Pavlov described, an association is established between the Past and an eventual Future. Although the Past, the Present, and an eventual Future are part of the "mental landscape" that the brain manages at all times during wakefulness, the brain does not confuse Past with Present, Past with Future, or Present with Future. The fact of being able to survive in a Present that is constantly changing, moment by moment, is proof of the above. The information that represents what is happening in the relevant material environment generates a utilitarian “mental correlate of the Present”. In practice, the survival of a body that is constituted by Matter takes place in the Present, the only "place" where Matter exists. For 550 million years the brain has been a tool used to deal with what is happening in the Present, until, some two hundred thousand years ago, the language that characterizes us emerged, which led to the incorporation into the "correlative mental of the relevant medium”, objects, things, events, which are not necessarily part of what is happening in the Present in the world of matter. Let me know if you're interested in going deeper into the topic. (I clarify that I write in Spanish and use the Google translator)

[@kritischinteressiert]

Joscha Bach and Jordan Peterson talking about a little bit of everything, starting with discussing the book of genesis, would an intellectual highlight.

[@christopherhamilton3621]

Jordan wouldn’t be able to keep up…😂

[@erikhaegert5426]

... Jordan Peterson? 😳🥲😂🤣

[@Gattomorto12]

Visto per la seconda volta.

[@MPatrickN]

Shots fired @17:48.

[@xmathmanx]

Ty, I was searching for this.

[@givemorephilosophy]

8.8 Min The existential reality is beyond the mathematical language. We can only understand the quantification part of the Existential Reality using Arithmetic. Qualitative language and causal language need to be added to mathematical language to understand Existential Reality. I know of it and can explain all sciences as I have known understood and experienced Existential Reality and know the things as they are and help everyone and anyone see Reality as it exists. 🙏🙏🙏 Neither Bragging nor under claiming just humble submission for humanity to check validate and adopt for a contended resolved happy life 🙏🙏

[@hankroest6836]

"Aaahhh, Bach!"

[@flflflflflfl]

The bit about the computational nature of cells (around 38:00) has always seemed fascinating to me. Any book recommendations to dive deeper?

[@philippweisang]

Pretty sure "A New Kind of Science" by Wolfram talks about this somewhere

[@JanoDo]

check the work of Michael Levin!

[@flflflflflfl]

@@JanoDo saw him on Lex Fridman the other day, thx!

[@JanoDo]

@@flflflflflfl Joscha and he had a very interesting conversation in the Theories of Everything podcast the other day, give it a go if u liked the pod with Lex

[@flflflflflfl]

@@JanoDo Joscha Bach is my personal hero, have you read his book? And the one by Dietrich Dörner that inspired it? Great stuff!

[@CandidDate]

you take the low road, I'll take the high

[@zbigniewbecker5080]

12:24 The idea of 'unetscheidbarkeit' discovered by Goedel was misunderstood by Goedel himself and by other people, quite something!

[@anywallsocket]

You can have the game of life in the game of life sure, but can you have a game state S that correlates uniquely with every meta state S' ? That proof would close the connection between Gödel numbering and Conway's GoL.

[@jondor654]

Informal additive hopefully. The natural language postulation of an infinity belies the impossibility of such instantiation. It only has an abstract atomicity. To build upon it is not a solid trajectory. Paradox is bound to occur.

[@Deserrto]

2:03:20

[@dr.mikeybee]

Is incompleteness somehow another way of describing irreducibility? Are there existence theorums that can only be known by running the system to the end?

[@randompal9828]

Practically all of them

[@Aquietdreamer11]

I believe incompleteness refers to the phenomenon when a system cannot operate its own rules or parameters without referencing rules outside of the system. In any system there are things you must assume to be true but cannot actually be proved true through the system itself

[@starfishsystems]

@@Aquietdreamer11 No, incompleteness, first of all, doesn't concern the axioms of a formal system but the inferences which can be derived from those axioms. Second, and most interesting, it concerns the existence of a "gap" between what can be said and what can be validated within the system. This distinction is easier to understand once we notice that Gödel's proofs are essentially linguistic. He said, let's look at how a formal language is constructed in the most general case, and at what can then be expressed using that language, and what we can infer about the properties of those expressions. It's certainly possible to form syntactically valid expressions which are obviously true, or obviously false. For example, in propositional logic the expression "P = P" is true whereas "P = !P" is false, and this correspondence can be decided from within the formalism. But what Gödel did was show that (1) for grammars above a certain complexity, some expressions can't be decided from within the formalism, and (2) they can be decided by extending the formalism grammatically (axiomatically, if you prefer, though he worked strictly in terms of languages rather than meanings) but doing so necessarily introduces the ability to form further undecidable expressions.

[@starfishsystems]

Incompleteness refers to abstract formal systems, which are investigated in a proof theoretic manner. Irreducibility refers to concrete physical systems and their physical properties, which are investigated empirically. Existence theorems are part of the development of a formal system. They make no reference to physical systems, so there is no "running the system to the end" or rather there is no SPECIAL CASE for doing so. ALL proofs must complete (satisfy the Halting Problem) in order to constitute proofs and not merely conjectures. For example, consider some arbitrary irrational number r. The definition of an irrational number is one which cannot be expressed as a ratio of some two integers p and q. (Euclid offers an elegant proof by contradiction in the case of √2 that it is irrational.) A bitstring of finite length, on the other hand, under any encoding can only express a rational number, therefore irrational numbers require an infinitely long bitstring. Now for the question. Given some finite bitstring f, can a proof exist that f DOES NOT APPEAR in r? The answer is no, such a proof cannot exist. Any proof would have to "run the system" of searching r forever, because only on completion of that search could we show that f was never encountered. The search will not halt. A proof that f DOES EXIST in r is somewhat different, by the way, because a search will halt if f exists but not otherwise. So the proof may or not exist, in principle, depending on the specific values of f and r.

[@stanleyklein524]

@@Aquietdreamer11 that at least one of the take-away messages from Godel.

[@timelessone23]

Best way to understand life is to create life... ♥️

[@kohlenstofftierchen]

2:03:00

[@Cssaarr]

HEEEEEEELP! 1) what does He say at 5.40 aprox? ("philosophy is the domain of all theories....¿?¿?¿? "of moral projects? "of all projects" ? "or all projects"? 2) and at 6.02: "mathematics starts.....¡?¡?¡?" until 6. 10. 3) and at 8.50: "beyond what people could infer ...." ¡?¡?¡?

[@jagsittermedsimonochjobbar]

1) ”Philosophy is the domain of all theories, of all models” 2) “Mathematics starts out with the simplest languages, those where truth is clearly defined, these are the formal languages” 3) “Beyond what people could infer should be done if you want to do the right mathematics”

[@Cssaarr]

@@jagsittermedsimonochjobbar wow thanks A LOT !!!

[@Waferdicing]

🤤

[@smartbart80]

16:45 the sound of the brain being blown ;)

[@Gattomorto12]

2

[@lkd982]

Sounds like a computer reincarnation of the old Homunculus theory

[@givemorephilosophy]

16 min Charles Darwin was a great man. He pushed mankind into a spree of competition that is unreal. In Existential Reality there is only cooperation and complementary coexistence. This single most wrong direction by Darwin created chaos that is now very difficult to repair. We Humanity as a species need to unite move away from competition and live in cooperation to make the earth safe for humanity again. 🙏🙏

[@christopherhamilton3621]

Your last paragraph is true, but the bit about Darwin is utterly absurd.

[@givemorephilosophy]

@@christopherhamilton3621 If I hurt your respect for Darwin. I am sorry. I am equally grateful to Darwin as everyone else but want to make sure we move away from his theory of competition or a scarcity creating a struggle for survival. Rather it is the festivity of evolution and manifestation of the next step to free will. 🙂🙂

[@JohnChampagne]

There's still no established protocol for people to edit captioning using a command string:old text:new text in comments "2:04:35 Caption-change:pansexualism is true:panpsychism is true"

[@Lumeone]

Bravo for pointing glaring limitations of Chomsky's ideas. So blatantly limited, you are left puzzled how this idea can be even considered as valid. Politics aside science is a show on its own.

[@Kulturnaya_svolotch]

Как я сюда попал? Что это?

[@JBSCORNERL8]

He’s brilliant but his accent and his low tone makes him hard to understand sometimes.

[@imrematajz1624]

The slides do not follow the topics Joscha is talking about. It feels more confusing than it really should be with a bit of visual correspondence. Or maybe this is the whole point. To appear difficult?

[@mznxbcv12345]

Good until 52:00, everything after is either conjecture or nonsense.

[@stanleyklein524]

Stop saying "mind"! For God sake. What the hell is a mind? What the brain does? Fine. The brain is involved in digestion. Is digestion a part of the purview of mind?

[@aidanhall6679]

And what does the brain do? You knew the answer to that long before you knew what the brain was.

[@flflflflflfl]

mind

[@mznxbcv12345]

it's Awareness , English grammar does not distinguish between abstractions and reality. Bach is guilty of his criticism of others.

[@davidjooste5788]

I don't like that throwaway line "...we can leave philosophy to the machines..." No thanks.

[@jondor654]

This is futuristic and who can say , however that delegation may require some embodiment or it's simulation , a heavy lift.

[@TheMahayanist]

Chomsky has no idea what he's talking about.

[@stanleyklein524]

Anyone who thinks this video makes sense has no idea what they are thinking about.

[@TylerRein]

@@stanleyklein524 curious in good faith here. What do you mean by your comment?

[@Rayzeus09]

A lot of what he talking about is inspired by Chomsky

[@christopherhamilton3621]

You’re hilarious AND clueless…😂

[@mznxbcv12345]

everything post 52:00 is either conjecture or nonsense

[@nullvoid12]

In the world of unnecessary AI hype, this is gold