Joscha Bach - AGI24 Keynote (Cyberanimism)


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Aug 21 2024 57 mins   7
Podcast: Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)
Episode: Joscha Bach - AGI24 Keynote (Cyberanimism)
Release date: 2024-08-21

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Dr. Joscha Bach introduces a surprising idea called "cyber animism" in his AGI-24 talk - the notion that nature might be full of self-organizing software agents, similar to the spirits in ancient belief systems. Bach suggests that consciousness could be a kind of software running on our brains, and wonders if similar "programs" might exist in plants or even entire ecosystems.




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Joscha takes us on a tour de force through history, philosophy, and cutting-edge computer science, teasing us to rethink what we know about minds, machines, and the world around us. Joscha believes we should blur the lines between human, artificial, and natural intelligence, and argues that consciousness might be more widespread and interconnected than we ever thought possible.




Dr. Joscha Bach


https://x.com/Plinz




This is video 2/9 from our coverage of AGI-24 in Seattle https://agi-conf.org/2024/


Watch the official MLST interview with Joscha which we did right after this talk on our Patreon now on early access - https://www.patreon.com/posts/joscha-bach-110199676 (you also get access to our private discord and biweekly calls)




TOC:


00:00:00 Introduction: AGI and Cyberanimism


00:03:57 The Nature of Consciousness


00:08:46 Aristotle's Concepts of Mind and Consciousness


00:13:23 The Hard Problem of Consciousness


00:16:17 Functional Definition of Consciousness


00:20:24 Comparing LLMs and Human Consciousness


00:26:52 Testing for Consciousness in AI Systems


00:30:00 Animism and Software Agents in Nature


00:37:02 Plant Consciousness and Ecosystem Intelligence


00:40:36 The California Institute for Machine Consciousness


00:44:52 Ethics of Conscious AI and Suffering


00:46:29 Philosophical Perspectives on Consciousness


00:49:55 Q&A: Formalisms for Conscious Systems


00:53:27 Coherence, Self-Organization, and Compute Resources




YT version (very high quality, filmed by us live)


https://youtu.be/34VOI_oo-qM




Refs:


Aristotle's work on the soul and consciousness


Richard Dawkins' work on genes and evolution


Gerald Edelman's concept of Neural Darwinism


Thomas Metzinger's book "Being No One"


Yoshua Bengio's concept of the "consciousness prior"


Stuart Hameroff's theories on microtubules and consciousness


Christof Koch's work on consciousness


Daniel Dennett's "Cartesian Theater" concept


Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory


Mike Levin's work on organismal intelligence


The concept of animism in various cultures


Freud's model of the mind


Buddhist perspectives on consciousness and meditation


The Genesis creation narrative (for its metaphorical interpretation)


California Institute for Machine Consciousness