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Treating AI as a philosophical project by Joscha Bach

Why do we find ourselves in a universe that has learnable properties?

How is it possible for a symbol to mean something? What is the relationship between observation, perception and knowledge?

What is agency? What constitutes a self model?

When we treat Artificial Intelligence as a philosophical project, we gain a fascinating and useful perspective on age old questions of philosophy.

This short presentation is going to give pointers at some of these questions, and aims at opening up a wider space of discussion.

Our speaker, Joscha Bach, PhD, is a cognitive scientist and AI researcher with a focus on computational models of cognition and neuro-symbolic AI.

He has taught and worked in AI research at Humboldt University of Berlin, the Institute for Cognitive Science in Osnabrück, the MIT media lab, the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.

He is currently a principal AI scientist at Intel Labs, California.

00:07:06 — Introduction Joscha Bach to the Bugout community
00:08:13 — AI as a philosophical project
00:16:50 — Symbolic AI on the example of chess
00:17:55 — Artificial neurons
00:20:11 — Biological neurons
00:24:55 — Cybernetics: modeling in the service of control
00:28:02 — The controllable universe
00:37:14 — General form of a perceptual model
00:41:29 — The four types of representation anchors
00:43:50 — Attention as an agent
00:46:55 — Questions: the influence of bacteria, paradigms for LM, AI safety, issues of identity, GTP-3, motivation for bots, etc.