Joscha Bach: Consciousness and AGI — #76

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 the philosophy of mind.

Links of interest:

• http://bach.ai/
• https://x.com/Plinz

Steve and Joscha discuss:

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (01:26) - Growing up in the forest in East Germany
• (06:23) - Academia: early neural net pioneers, CS and Philosophy
• (10:17) - The fall of the Berlin Wall
• (14:57) - Commodore 64 and early programming experiences
• (15:29) - AGI timeline and predictions
• (19:35) - Scaling hypothesis, beyond Transformers, universality of information structures and world models
• (25:29) - Consciousness
• (41:11) - The ethics of brain interventions, zombies, and the Turing test
• (43:43) - LLMs and simulated phenomenology
• (46:34) - The future of consciousness research
• (48:44) - Cultural perspectives on suffering
• (52:19) - AGI and humanity's future
• (58:18) - Simulation hypothesis
• (01:03:33) - Liquid AI: Innovations and goals
• (01:16:02) - Philosophy of Identity: the Transporter Problem, Is there anything beyond memory records?

Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.

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Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to [email protected] or Steve on X @hsu_steve.