About this episode

The episode features a discussion with cognitive scientist Joscha Bach on consciousness and artificial intelligence.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . We are back on the consciousness train again, trying to understand what that thing is. So I've been talking with Joscha Bach, renowned cognitive scientist 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’s Media Lab and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He’s the creator of the MicroPsi cognitive architecture, the author of Principles of Synthetic Intelligence, and the executive director of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness. We conclude by talking about how to know if something is conscious, the role of memory, what Joscha thinks of Integrated Information Theory, applying the Turing Test to LLMs and whether they’re entitled to rights, substrate independence, or the portability of consciousness from one platform to another, the possibility of making a conscious AI, and the geopolitics of doing so. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines! Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

People in this episode

Guest: Joscha Bach

Topics covered

• consciousness
• artificial intelligence
• cognitive science
• Turing Test
• memory
• geopolitics of AI

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Humboldt University of Berlin, Institute for Cognitive Science in Osnabrück, Berlin School of Mind and Brain, MIT’s Media Lab, Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, California Institute for Machine Consciousness

Books & works: Principles of Synthetic Intelligence

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