Dr. Joscha Bach introduces a surprising idea called "cyber animism" in his AGI-24 talk - the notion that nature might be full of self-organizing software agents, similar to the spirits in ancient belief systems. Bach suggests that consciousness could be a kind of software running on our brains, and wonders if similar "programs" might exist in plants or even entire ecosystems.
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Joscha takes us on a tour de force through history, philosophy, and cutting-edge computer science, teasing us to rethink what we know about minds, machines, and the world around us. Joscha believes we should blur the lines between human, artificial, and natural intelligence, and argues that consciousness might be more widespread and interconnected than we ever thought possible.
Dr. Joscha Bach
https://x.com/Plinz
This is video 2/9 from our coverage of AGI-24 in Seattle https://agi-conf.org/2024/
Watch the official MLST interview with Joscha which we did right after this talk on our Patreon now on early access - https://www.patreon.com/posts/joscha-bach-110199676 (you also get access to our private discord and biweekly calls)
TOC:
00:00:00 Introduction: AGI and Cyberanimism
00:03:57 The Nature of Consciousness
00:08:46 Aristotle's Concepts of Mind and Consciousness
00:13:23 The Hard Problem of Consciousness
00:16:17 Functional Definition of Consciousness
00:20:24 Comparing LLMs and Human Consciousness
00:26:52 Testing for Consciousness in AI Systems
00:30:00 Animism and Software Agents in Nature
00:37:02 Plant Consciousness and Ecosystem Intelligence
00:40:36 The California Institute for Machine Consciousness
00:44:52 Ethics of Conscious AI and Suffering
00:46:29 Philosophical Perspectives on Consciousness
00:49:55 Q&A: Formalisms for Conscious Systems
00:53:27 Coherence, Self-Organization, and Compute Resources
YT version (very high quality, filmed by us live)
https://youtu.be/34VOI_oo-qM
Refs:
Aristotle's work on the soul and consciousness
Richard Dawkins' work on genes and evolution
Gerald Edelman's concept of Neural Darwinism
Thomas Metzinger's book "Being No One"
Yoshua Bengio's concept of the "consciousness prior"
Stuart Hameroff's theories on microtubules and consciousness
Christof Koch's work on consciousness
Daniel Dennett's "Cartesian Theater" concept
Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory
Mike Levin's work on organismal intelligence
The concept of animism in various cultures
Freud's model of the mind
Buddhist perspectives on consciousness and meditation
The Genesis creation narrative (for its metaphorical interpretation)
California Institute for Machine Consciousness
