Joscha Bach

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Joscha Bach
Joscha Bach (11524872763).jpg
Bach in 2013
Born (1973-12-21) December 21, 1973 (age 51)
Weimar, East Germany
NationalityGerman
Alma mater Humboldt University of Berlin (MA)
Osnabrück University (PhD)
Scientific career
Fields Cognitive Science
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science
Institutions Intel
AI Foundation
Harvard
MIT Media Lab
Thesis Principles of Synthetic Intelligence; Building Blocks for an Architecture of Motivated Cognition  (2006)
Doctoral advisor Dietrich Dörner
Kai-Uwe Kühnberger
Website bach.ai

Joscha Bach (born 1973) is a German cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher known for his work on cognitive architectures, artificial intelligence, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, multi-agent systems, and the philosophy of mind. His research aims to bridge cognitive science and AI by studying how human intelligence and consciousness can be modeled computationally.

Contents

Early life and education

Bach was born in Weimar, East Germany, and displayed an early interest in philosophy, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. He received an MA (computer science) from Humboldt University of Berlin in 2000 and a PhD (cognitive science) from Osnabrück University in 2006, [1] [2] [3] where he conducted research on emotion modeling and artificial minds. His doctoral work focused on developing micropsi, a cognitive architecture designed to simulate human-like reasoning and decision-making processes.

Career

After completing his Ph.D., Bach became a key figure in AI research, especially in cognitive architectures and the computational theory of mind. [4] He has held a variety of positions in both academic and industrial research, contributing to AI development from both theoretical and applied perspectives. [5] His work frequently explores the boundaries of AI systems, questioning the limits of current machine learning technologies and addressing how future systems might achieve human-like general intelligence. [6]

Bach has worked in several prestigious institutions, including Martin Nowak's Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED), where he collaborated with other thought leaders in AI and cognitive science. [7] He has also held research positions at the MIT Media Lab [8] and has served as a vice president of research at AI Foundation, where he has focused on developing AI systems capable of more sophisticated, human-like interactions. [9]

A 2019 article in Science reported that Bach received funding from Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein's first conviction [10] , citing a conference paper that includes a funding acknowledgement. [11] In January 2020, a report published by Goodwin Procter following a fact-finding efforts, done on behalf of the MIT, outlined that Bach was hired to the Media Lab in part thanks to Epstein's donations to support Bach, claiming that donations done in November 2013 and in July and September 2014 totaled $300,000 (or 40% of Epstein’s post-conviction donations), corroborating these claims. [12] In May 2020, Harvard released a report of their own fact-finding efforts, finding that Martin Nowak permitted Bach access to PED offices between 2014-2019, but that "Harvard never paid or received funds to support" Bach's research. [13] The Harvard report also outlines that Bach was listed as a PED research scientist between 2014-2019, noting that two papers published after Bach's departure of MIT acknowledge support from Epstein and PED.

Research and Contributions

Joscha Bach's research is largely centered on cognitive architectures—computational models that attempt to replicate aspects of human cognition. [14] His work includes:

MicroPsi

A cognitive architecture that models how agents think and act based on perception, emotion, and goal-driven behavior. [15] Bach designed MicroPsi to simulate human-like reasoning and decision-making, contributing to AI systems that can navigate complex, real-world environments. [16]

Theories of Consciousness

Bach is well known for his discussions on the nature of consciousness and the computational modeling of subjective experience. [17] He argues that consciousness emerges from an information-processing system capable of creating internal models of itself and the world. He emphasizes the importance of mental models, emotional frameworks, and meta-cognition in the construction of conscious AI. [18]

Cognitive Limitations of AI

Bach has been a vocal critic of the current trends in machine learning, particularly the limitations of deep learning in creating truly intelligent systems. He contends that AI systems today lack understanding and operate more like "super-powered pattern recognition machines" than true cognitive agents. [19] He advocates for a move beyond current AI paradigms to develop machines capable of abstract reasoning, complex decision-making, and internal self-reflection. [20]

Consciousness and Free Will

In addition to his technical research, Bach is engaged with philosophical questions surrounding consciousness and free will. He suggests that consciousness is an emergent property of highly complex information-processing systems that develop internal models of themselves and the world around them. [21] He often debates whether free will truly exists or is merely a byproduct of predictive models constructed by our brains—a question with implications for future AI systems.

Philosophical Views

Bach's interests extend beyond AI and cognitive science to touch on deeper questions about consciousness, free will, the nature of reality, and the future of humanity in an age of intelligent machines. [22] His work is heavily influenced by philosophical discussions about phenomenology and epistemology. [23] He frequently engages in debates on the nature of the self, arguing that what we consider "self" is an illusion—a mental model constructed by the brain for practical purposes. [24]

Bach also envisions a future where AI might possess meta-cognition—the ability to be aware of its own thought processes and to reflect on them. [25] He suggests that while machines might achieve some level of subjective awareness, true consciousness in AI might only emerge when these systems can integrate their own experiences into a continuous narrative, much like humans do. [26]

He asserts that while today's AI systems are powerful, they are far from general intelligence. [27] He frequently discusses the limitations of AI, asserting that current AI lacks understanding or any true conception of the world around it. [28] He has been a prominent critic of overhyping deep learning models, advocating instead for more nuanced approaches that incorporate cognitive models, emotion modeling, and ethical considerations into AI research. [29]

Popularization and Public Speaking

In addition to his academic work, Bach is a prolific speaker and communicator who regularly shares his insights on cognitive science, AI, and philosophy. [30] He has given numerous talks at conferences, including TEDx, where he has covered topics such as the nature of intelligence, the future of AI, and the possibility of creating conscious machines. [31]

Bach is also an active participant in online discussions about AI and consciousness, appearing in podcasts, interviews, and public lectures. [32] He is known for his ability to explain complex ideas in accessible ways, making him a popular figure in the growing dialogue surrounding artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the future of human-machine interaction. [33]

Key Publications and Works

Principles of Synthetic Cognition

In this seminal work, Bach outlines the foundational principles of synthetic cognition, discussing how cognitive architectures could be designed to replicate human thought processes. [34]

Micropsi Cognitive Architecture

A detailed exposition of the Micropsi system, Bach's work in this area has been influential in shaping research in agent-based modeling and AI decision-making frameworks. [35] [36]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognitive science</span> Interdisciplinary scientific study of cognitive processes

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include perception, memory, attention, reasoning, language, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision-making to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Douglas Hofstadter</span> American professor of cognitive science (born 1945)

Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American cognitive and computer scientist whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, strange loops, artificial intelligence, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and a National Book Award for Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marvin Minsky</span> American cognitive scientist (1927–2016)

Marvin Lee Minsky was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research in artificial intelligence (AI). He co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory and wrote several texts about AI and philosophy.

Artificial consciousness, also known as machine consciousness, synthetic consciousness, or digital consciousness, is the consciousness hypothesized to be possible in artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Allen Newell</span> American cognitive scientist

Allen Newell was an American researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology. He contributed to the Information Processing Language (1956) and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theorist (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957). He was awarded the ACM's A.M. Turing Award along with Herbert A. Simon in 1975 for their contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that matches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks. This contrasts with narrow AI, which is limited to specific tasks. Artificial superintelligence (ASI), on the other hand, refers to AGI that greatly exceeds human cognitive capabilities. AGI is considered one of the definitions of strong AI.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stan Franklin</span> American scientist (1931–2023)

Stan Franklin was an American scientist. He was the W. Harry Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor at the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee, and co-director of the Institute of Intelligent Systems. He is the author of Artificial Minds, and the developer of IDA and its successor LIDA, both computational implementations of Global Workspace Theory. He is the founder of the Cognitive Computing Research Group at the University of Memphis.

A cognitive architecture refers to both a theory about the structure of the human mind and to a computational instantiation of such a theory used in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational cognitive science. These formalized models can be used to further refine comprehensive theories of cognition and serve as the frameworks for useful artificial intelligence programs. Successful cognitive architectures include ACT-R and SOAR. The research on cognitive architectures as software instantiation of cognitive theories was initiated by Allen Newell in 1990.

An artificial brain is software and hardware with cognitive abilities similar to those of the animal or human brain.

Computational cognition is the study of the computational basis of learning and inference by mathematical modeling, computer simulation, and behavioral experiments. In psychology, it is an approach which develops computational models based on experimental results. It seeks to understand the basis behind the human method of processing of information. Early on computational cognitive scientists sought to bring back and create a scientific form of Brentano's psychology.

Synthetic intelligence (SI) is an alternative/opposite term for artificial intelligence emphasizing that the intelligence of machines need not be an imitation or in any way artificial; it can be a genuine form of intelligence. John Haugeland proposes an analogy with simulated diamonds and synthetic diamonds—only the synthetic diamond is truly a diamond. Synthetic means that which is produced by synthesis, combining parts to form a whole; colloquially, a human-made version of that which has arisen naturally. A "synthetic intelligence" would therefore be or appear human-made, but not a simulation.

Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes. "The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination" (p. 198). "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world." These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science. How the actions involved in enactivism relate to age-old questions about free will remains a topic of active debate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Goertzel</span> American computer scientist and AI researcher

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gary Marcus</span> American cognitive scientist (born 1970)

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Psi-theory, developed by Dietrich Dörner at the University of Bamberg, is a systemic psychological theory covering human action regulation, intention selection and emotion. It models the human mind as an information processing agent, controlled by a set of basic physiological, social and cognitive drives. Perceptual and cognitive processing are directed and modulated by these drives, which allow the autonomous establishment and pursuit of goals in an open environment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenCog</span> Project for an open source artificial intelligence framework

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References

  1. ↑ "Joscha Bach | Edge.org". www.edge.org. Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  2. ↑ TEDxBeaconStreet Talks
  3. ↑ "Exciting progress in Artificial Intelligence – Joscha Bach – Science, Technology & the Future". 11 August 2020. Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  4. ↑ "Joscha Bach: AI Researcher and Cognitive Scientist". AI Foundation. Retrieved 11 November 2022.
  5. ↑ "Joscha Bach: Publications" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  6. ↑ Bach, Joscha (2009). Principles of Synthetic Intelligence: An Architecture of Motivated Cognition. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0195370676.
  7. ↑ "AI Research at Harvard" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  8. ↑ "MIT Media Lab" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  9. ↑ "About" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  10. ↑ "What kind of researcher did sex offender Jeffrey Epstein like to fund? He told Science before he died". www.science.org. Retrieved 27 December 2024.
  11. ↑ Bach, Joscha; Gallagher, Katherine (2018). Iklé, Matthew; Franz, Arthur; Rzepka, Rafal; Goertzel, Ben (eds.). "Request Confirmation Networks in MicroPsi 2". Artificial General Intelligence. Cham: Springer International Publishing: 12–20. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-97676-1_2. ISBN   978-3-319-97676-1.
  12. ↑ Report concerning Jeffrey Epstein's Interactions with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. January 10, 2020. Roberto M. Braceras, Jennifer L. Chunias, Kevin P. Martin. https://factfindingjan2020.mit.edu/files/MIT-report.pdf (Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20241216110003/https://factfindingjan2020.mit.edu/files/MIT-report.pdf)
  13. ↑ Report concerning Jeffrey E. Epstein's Connections to Harvard University. May 2020. Diane E. Lopez, Ara B. Gershengorn, Martin F. Murphy https://ogc.harvard.edu/files/ogc/files/report_concerning_jeffrey_e._epsteins_connections_to_harvard_university.pdf (Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20241201231751/https://ogc.harvard.edu/files/ogc/files/report_concerning_jeffrey_e._epsteins_connections_to_harvard_university.pdf)
  14. ↑ "Cognitive Architectures" (PDF). Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  15. ↑ "The MicroPsi Project" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  16. ↑ Bach, J. (2003). "Designing Agents with MicroPsi Node Nets". Proceedings of KI 2003: 164–178.
  17. ↑ Bach, Joscha (2009). Principles of Synthetic Intelligence: An Architecture of Motivated Cognition. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0195370676.
  18. ↑ "Consciousness and AI" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  19. ↑ "Limitations of AI" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  20. ↑ "AI Paradigms". Archived from the original on 10 July 2020. Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  21. ↑ "Joscha Bach: Consciousness and Free Will - Lex Fridman Podcast" . Retrieved 22 October 2023.
  22. ↑ "Philosophical Perspectives on AI" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  23. ↑ Bach, J. (2018). "The Influence of Philosophy on AI Research". AI & Society. 33: 437–445.
  24. ↑ "The Illusion of Self" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  25. ↑ "Meta-Cognition in AI" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  26. ↑ "Consciousness and AI" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  27. ↑ "Joscha Bach on AI" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  28. ↑ "The Limitations of Current AI" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  29. ↑ "Ethics and AI" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  30. ↑ "Joscha Bach Talks" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  31. ↑ "TEDx Talks by Joscha Bach" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  32. ↑ "Lex Fridman Podcast #101 - Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  33. ↑ "Public Understanding of AI" . Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  34. ↑ Bach, Joscha (2009). Principles of Synthetic Intelligence: An Architecture of Motivated Cognition. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0195370676.
  35. ↑ "MicroPsi Project" (PDF). Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  36. ↑ Bach, J. (2003). "Designing Agents with MicroPsi Node Nets". Proceedings of KI 2003: 164–178.
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