Joscha Bach

1973– · cognitive scientist

Topics: artificial intelligence, software design, learning, complexity

• You need to become unimportant as a subject, that is, if you are a philosopher, believe is not a verb. ...You have to submit to the things that are possibly true and... follow wherever your inquiry leads, but it's not about you, it has nothing to do with you.

  — Joscha Bach

• Mathematics is the kingdom of specification and computation is the kingdom of implementation. It's very important to understand this difference.

  — Joscha Bach

• To understand... mind, we have to ask how a system capable of constructing has to be built...

  — Joscha Bach

• Long ago, physics and other natural sciences... had become computational.

  — Joscha Bach

• Reddit... Facebook... Twitter... are companies that... own a protocol... imposed on a community

  — Joscha Bach

• Arguably most people are not generally intelligent, because they don't have to solve problems that make them generally intelligent.

  — Joscha Bach

• [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.

  — Joscha Bach

• [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...

  — Joscha Bach

• Computation is different. Computation can exist. It starts with an initial state, and then you have a transition function. You do the work. You apply the transition function [and] you get into the next state. Computation is always finite.

  — Joscha Bach

• 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

• Everything we know about ourselves is... ordering... over features available at the interface; we know of mental phenomena only insofar as they are patterns or constructed over patterns.

  — Joscha Bach

• How difficult is it to define a brain? We know that the brain must be somewhere hidden in the genome [which] fits in a CD-ROM. It's not that complicated. It's easier than Microsoft Windows.

  — Joscha Bach

• [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.

  — Joscha Bach

• Genetically speaking, a human is a pretty big mouse, with a few bits changed

  — Joscha Bach

• We do not ...recognize ...objects of our environment; we construct them over the regularities ...at the system interface of our cognitive system.

  — Joscha Bach

• [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.

  — Joscha Bach

• Minds are software states... Software doesn't have identity.

  — Joscha Bach

• This book is an attempt to explain cognition—thought, perception, emotion, experience—in terms of a machine, that is, using a cognitive architecture.

  — Joscha Bach

• [W]hile dynamical systems often cannot be effectively computed on a finite state machine (such as a von Neumann computer), they can often be efficiently approximated.

  — Joscha Bach

• [M]otivation... does not arise from intelligence itself, but from a motivational system underlying all directed behavior.

  — Joscha Bach