THE FUTURE IS HERE

Joscha Bach – Philosophy of AI – Winter Intelligence/AGI12 Oxford University

“I see the AGI conference as an attempt.. to get back to the original idea of artificial intelligence – to see computational systems as an avenue to developing an understanding of how the mind works. I think this is at its heart a philosophical issue, a philosophical enterprise… but the methods that we need are some that we do not find in contemporary philosophy – so my idea is not to build applications or to develop formalisms that can be used to build applications, but it’s about maybe a subset of analytical philosophy; it’s in a way ‘computational philosophy’ where analytical philosophy allows you to express anything that can be, or use anything that can be expressed in a formal language in principle – I want to narrow this even further down. There are things that can be expressed in a computational system that are computable; that can run. This means you do exclude paradoxes which excludes not only those things that you cannot specify, but also excludes things you can specify but are paradoxes which could run – so eventually the proof that you have understood something from the point of view of a computer scientist is that it works. And I do think that you need such an approach as it has pervaded most of physics for instance already – you need such an approach in philosophy of mind too.”

Joscha Bach, Ph.D. is an AI researcher who worked and published about cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. He earned his Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and has built computational models of motivated decision making, perception, categorization, and concept-formation. He is especially interested in the philosophy of AI and in the augmentation of the human mind.

Joscha has taught computer science, AI, and cognitive science at the Humboldt-University of Berlin and the Institute for Cognitive Science at Osnabrück. His book “Principles of Synthetic Intelligence” (Oxford University Press) is available on amazon now: http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Synthetic-Intelligence-PSI-Architectures/dp/0195370678

Interview with Joscha Bach by Ben Goertzel on HplusMagazine.com : http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/05/04/joscha-bach%E2%80%99s-quest-to-understand-the-mind/

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