324 - Guest: Joscha Bach, AI Cognition Researcher, part 1

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . We are back on the consciousness train again, trying to understand what that thing is. Most of us would cop to being conscious, but how many of us have any idea how to describe it, let alone test for it? Here to help with that is Joscha Bach, cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher who uses the lens of artificial intelligence to understand the human mind. He has taught and researched at Humboldt University of Berlin, the Institute for Cognitive Science in Osnabrück, the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He’s the creator of the MicroPsi cognitive architecture and the author of Principles of Synthetic Intelligence. At Intel Labs, he led a team for cognitive AI. He is currently the executive director of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness where he draws on computer science, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy to ask how minds construct reality, how consciousness might emerge from computation, and what AI can teach us about ourselves. We talk about the Institute’s mission, the machine consciousness hypothesis, why we actually are in a particular kind of simulation, dreaming, the role of perceptions and predictions, and a fascinating take on the Chinese Room. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.