Your Brainstem and the Motivational System: An Overview of Cybernetic Feedback Loops

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Our brainstem and limbic system tell us when we need to eat based on our glucose levels. This is part of our lower-level motivational system. There are physiological, cognitive, and social needs that all interact and are implemented in different parts of our nervous system. These systems are like cybernetic feedback loops, not complicated but filled with code. We have a motivational agent that drives actions, like a robot going for a ball or us going to eat. Our perceptual system helps us predict the environment and solve control problems. However, it's challenging to build a machine learning system that can analyze all the data at once and find relationships among them.

Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(07:15) – Life is hard
(09:38) – Consciousness
(16:24) – What is life?
(26:33) – Free will
(40:38) – Simulation
(42:49) – Base layer of reality
(58:24) – Boston Dynamics
(1:06:43) – Engineering consciousness
(1:17:12) – Suffering
(1:26:06) – Postmodernism
(1:30:25) – Psychedelics
(1:43:40) – GPT-3
(1:52:22) – GPT-4
(1:58:47) – OpenAI Codex
(2:01:02) – Humans vs AI: Who is more dangerous?
(2:17:47) – Hitler
(2:22:44) – Autonomous weapon systems
(2:30:11) – Mark Zuckerberg
(2:35:47) – Love
(2:50:00) – Michael Malice and anarchism
(3:06:57) – Love
(3:11:05) – Advice for young people
(3:15:42) – Meaning of life