Joscha Bach: Nature of Reality, Dreams, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #212

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIpUf-Vy2JA"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]the following is the conversation with yoshi bach his second time on the podcast yoshi is one of the most fascinating minds in the world exploring the nature of intelligence cognition computation and consciousness to support this podcast please check out our sponsors coinbase codecademy linode netsuite and expressvpn their links are in the description this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with yosha bach thank you for once again coming on to this particular russian program and sticking to the theme of a russian program let's start with the darkest of topics so this is inspired by one of your tweets you wrote that quote when life feels unbearable i remind myself that i'm not a person i am a piece of software running on the brain of a random ape for a few decades it's not the worst brain to run on have you experienced low points in your life have you experienced depression of course we all experience low points in our life and we get appalled by the things by the ugliness of stuff around us we might get desperate about our lack of self-regulation and sometimes life is hard and i suspect you don't get to your life nobody does to get through their life without low points and without moments where they're despairing and i thought that let's capture this state and how to deal with that state and i found that very often you realize that when you stop taking things personally when you realize that this notion of a person is a fiction similar as it is in westworld where the robots realize that their memories and desires are just stuff that keeps them in the loop and they don't have to act on those memories and desires that our memories and expectations is what make us unhappy and the present rarely does the day in which we are for the most part it's okay right when we are right sitting here right here right now we can choose how we feel and the thing that affects us is the expectation that something is going to be different from what we wanted to be or the memory that something was different from what you wanted it to be and once we basically zoom out from all this what's left is not a person what's left is this state of being conscious which is a software state and software doesn't have an identity it's a physical law and it's a law that acts in all of us and it's embedded in a suitable substrate and we didn't pick that substrate right we are mostly randomly instantiated on it and there all these individuals and everybody has to be one of them and uh eventually you're stuck on one of them and um have to deal with that so you're like a leaf floating down the river you just have to accept that there's a river and you just that you are an agent is a construct right what part of that is actually under your control and i think that our consciousness is largely a control model for our own attention so we notice where we are looking and we can influence what we are looking how we are disambiguating things how we put things together in our mind and the whole system that runs us is this big cybernetic motivational system so we're basically like a little monkey sitting on top of an elephant and we can put this elephant here and there to go this way or that way and we might have the illusion that we are the elephant or that we are telling it what to do and sometimes we notice that it walks into a completely different direction and we didn't set this thing up it just is the situation that we find ourselves in how much prodding can we actually do of the elephant a lot but i think that our uh consciousness cannot create the motive force is the elephant consciousness in this metaphor no the monkey is the consciousness the monkey is the attentional system that is observing things there is a large perceptual system combined with the motivational system that is actually providing the interface to everything and our own consciousness i think is a tool that directs the attention of that system which means it singles out features and performs conditional operations for which it needs an index memory but this index memory is what we perceive as our stream of consciousness but the consciousness is not in charge that's an illusion so everything outside of that consciousness is the elephant so it's the physics of the universe but it's also society that's outside of europe i would say the elephant is the agent so there is an environment which the agent is stomping and uh you are influencing a little part of that agent so uh can you is the agent a single human being what's what which object has agency that's an interesting question i think a way to think about an agent is that it's a controller with a set point generator the notion of a controller comes from cybernetics and control theory control system consists out of a system that is regulating some value and the deviation of that value from a set point and it has a sensor that measures the system's deviation from that set point and an effector that can be parametrized by the controller so the controller tells the effector to do a certain thing and the goal is to reduce the distance between the set point and the current value of the system and there's environment which disturbs the regulated system which brings it away from that set point so simplest case is the thermostat the thermostat is really simple because it doesn't have a model the thermostat is only trying to minimize the set point deviation in the next moment and if you want to minimize the set point deviation over a longer time span you need to integrate it you need to model what is going to happen so for instance when you think about that your set point is to be comfortable in life maybe you need to make yourself uncomfortable first right so you need to make a model of what's going to happen when and this is task of the controller is to use its sensors to measure the state of the environment and the system that is being regulated and figure out what to do and if the task is complex enough the set points are complicated enough and if the controller has enough capacity and enough sensor feedback then the task of the controller is to make a model of the entire universe that it's in the conditions under which it exists and of itself and this is a very complex agent and we are in that category and an agent is not necessarily a thing in the universe it's a class of models that we use to interpret aspects of the universe and be when we notice the around us a lot of things only make sense at the level that you are entangled with them is we interpret them as control systems that make models of the world and try to minimize their own set points so but the models are the agents the agent is a class of model and we notice that we are an agent ourself we are the agent that is using our own control model to perform actions we notice we uh produce a change in the model and things in the world change and this is how we discover the idea that we have a body that we are situated environment and that we have a first person perspective still don't understand what's the best way to think of which object has agency with with respect to human beings is is it the body is it the brain is it the contents of the brain that has agency like what's the actuators that you're referring to what is the controller and where does it reside or is it these impossible things like because i keep trying to ground it to space-time the three-dimensional space and the one dimension of time what's the agent in that for humans there is not just one it depends on the way in which you're looking at the thing in which you're framing it imagine that you are say angela merkel and you are acting on behalf of germany then you could say that germany is the agent and in the mind of angela merkel she is germany to some extent because in the way in which she acts the destiny of germany changes there are things that she can change that basically affect the behavior of that nation state okay so it's hierarchies of to go to another one of your tweets with uh i think your uh playfully mocking jeff hawkins with saying his brains all the way down so it's like it's agents all the way down it's agents made up of agents made up of agents like if phanja marco's germany and germany's made up a bunch of people and the people are themselves agents in in some kind of context and then people are made up of cells each individual so is it agents all the way down i suspect that has to be like this in a world where things are self-organizing most of the complexity that we are looking at everything in life is about self-organization yeah so i think up from the level of life you have agents and below life you rarely have agents because sometimes you have control systems that emerge randomly in nature and try to achieve a set point but they're not that interesting agents that make models and because to make an interesting model of the world you typically need a system that is true and complete can i ask you a personal question uh what's the line between life and non-life it's personal because you're a life form so what do you think in this emerging complexity at which point does the thing start being living and have agency personally i think that the simplest answer is that life is sales because life is what cells cells biological cells so it's a particular kind of principle that we have discovered to exist in nature it's modular stuff that consists out of basically this dna tape is a read write head on top of it that is able to perform arbitrary computations and state transitions within the cell and it's combined with a membrane that insulates the cell from its environment and there are chemical reactions inside of the cell that are in this equilibrium and the cell is running in such a way that this this equilibrium doesn't disappear and the cell goes if the cell goes into an equilibrium state it dies and it requires something like an neck entropy extractor to maintain this this equilibrium so it's able to harvest like entropy from its environment and keep itself running yeah so there's information and there's a wall to protect to to to maintain this disequilibrium but isn't this very earth-centric like what you're referring to as i'm not making a normative notion uh you could say that there are probably other things in the universe that are cell-like and life-like and you could also call them life but eventually it's just a willingness of to find an agreement of how to use the terms i like cells because it's completely co-extensional with the way that we used the word even before we knew about cells so people were pointing at some stuff and saying this is somehow animate and this is very different from the non-animated stuff and what's the difference between the living and the dead stuff and it's mostly whether the cells are working or not and uh also this boundary of life where we say that for instance a virus is basically an information packet that is subverting the cell and not life by itself that makes sense to me and it's somewhat arbitrary you could of course say that systems that permanently maintain a disequilibrium and can self-replicate are always life and maybe that's a useful definition too but this is eventually just how you want to use the word is it uh so useful for conversation but is it uh somehow fundamental to the universe do you think there's a actual line to eventually be drawn between life and non-life or is it all a kind of continuum i don't think it's a continuum but there's nothing magical that is happening um living systems are a certain type of machine what about non-living systems is it also a machine there are non-living machines but the question is at which point is the system able to un uh perform arbitrary state transitions in uh to make representations and living things can do this and of course we can also build non-living things that can do this but we don't know anything in nature that is not a cell and is not created by the lola life that is able to do that not not only do we not know i don't think we have the tools to see otherwise i always worry that we we look at the world too narrowly like we have there could be life of a very different kind right under our noses that we're just not seeing because we're not either limitations of our cognitive capacity or we're just not open-minded enough either with the tools of science or just the tools of our own mind yeah that's possible i find the thought very fascinating and i suspect that many of us ask ourselves since childhood what are the things that we are missing what kind of systems and interconnections exist that are outside of our gaze but the um we are looking for it and physics doesn't have much room at the moment for uh opening up something that would not violate the conservation of information as we know it yeah but i i wonder about time time scale and scale spatial scale whether we just need to um open up our idea of what like how life presents itself it could be operating in a much slower time scale yeah a much faster time scale and it's almost sad to think that there's all this life around us that we're not seeing because we're just not like thinking in terms of the right of the right scale both time and space what is your definition of life what do you understand this life [Music] entities of sufficiently high complexity that are full of surprises i don't know i don't have a free will so that just came out of my mouth i'm not sure that even makes sense there are certain characteristics so complexity seems to be an unnecessary property of life and i almost want to say it has ability to do something unexpected it seems to me that life is the main source of complexity on earth yes and complexity is basically a bridgehead that order builds into chaos by modeling by processing information in such a way that you can perform reactions that would not be possible for dump systems and this means that you can harvest neck entropy that dump systems cannot harvest and this is what complexity is mostly about yeah in some sense the purpose of life is to create complexity yeah increasing i mean there there's um there seems to be some kind of universal drive towards increasing pockets of complexity i don't know what that is that seems to be like a fundamental i don't know if it's a property of the universe or it's just the consequence of the way the universe works but there seems to be this small pockets of emerging complexity that builds on top of each other and starts having like greater and greater complexity by having like a hierarchy of complexity little organisms building up a little society that then operates almost as an individual organism itself and all of a sudden you have uh germany and merkel but that's not obvious to me everything that goes up has to come down at some point right so every if you see this big exponential curve somewhere it's usually the beginning of an s-curve where something eventually reaches saturation and the s-curve is the beginning of some kind of bump that goes down again and there is just the thing that when you are in sight of an evolution of life you are on top of a puddle of negentropy that is being sucked dry by life and during uh that happening you see an increase in complexity because life forms are competing with each other to get more and more and a finer and finer corner of that like entropy extraction but that i feel like that's a gradual beautiful process like that's almost you know follows a process akin to evolution and the way it comes down is not the same way it came up the way it comes down is usually harshly and quickly so usually there's some kind of catastrophic event well the roman empire took a long time uh but that's would that be would you classify this as a decrease in complexity though yes i think that this uh size of the cities that could be fed has decreased dramatically and you could see that the quality of the art decreased and it did so gradually and maybe future generations when they look at the history of the united states in the 21st century will also talk about the gradual decline not something that suddenly happens do you have a sense of where we are are we on the exponential rise are we at the peak or are we the downslope of the the united states empire it's very hard to say from a single human perspective but i it seems to me that we are probably at the peak i think that's probably the definition of like optimism and cynicism so my nature of optimism is i think we're on the rise but uh i think it's just all a matter of perspective nobody knows but i do think that erroring on the side of optimism like you need a sufficient number you need a minimum number of optimists in order to make that up thing actually work and so i tend to be on the side of the optimists i think that we are basically a species of grasshoppers that have turned into locusts and when you are in that locust mode you see an amazing rise of population numbers and of the complexity of the interactions between the individuals but it's ultimately the question is is it sustainable see i think we're a bunch of lions and tigers that have become domesticated cats to use a different metaphor as i'm not exactly sure we're so destructive or just softer and nicer and lazier but i think we have monkeys and not the cats and if you look at the monkeys they are very busy are the ones that have a lot of sex those monkeys not just the bonobos i think that all the monkeys are basically a discontent species that always needs to meddle well the gorillas seem to have a little bit more of a structure but it's a different different part of the tree [Laughter] okay uh you mentioned the elephant and the the monkey riding the elephant and uh consciousness is the monkey and there's some prodding that the monkey gets to do and sometimes the elephant listens i heard you got into some content maybe you can correct me but i heard you got into some contentious free will discussions uh is this with sam harris or something like that not that i know of some people on clubhouse told me you made a a bunch of uh um big debate points about free will well let me just then ask you where where in terms of the monkey and the elephant uh do you think we land in terms of the illusion of free will how much control does the monkey have we have to think about what the free will is in the first place we are not the machine we are not the thing that is making the decisions we are a model of that decision making process yeah and there is a difference between making your own decisions and predicting your own decisions yes and that difference is the first person perspective and what basically makes decision-making um and the conditions of free will distinct from just automatically doing the best thing is that uh we often don't know what the best thing is we make decisions under uncertainty we make informed bets using a betting algorithm that we don't yet understand because we haven't reverse engineered our own mind sufficiently we don't know the expected rewards we don't know the mechanism by which we estimate the rewards and so on but there is we observe ourselves performing where we see that uh we evade facts and factors and the future and then some kind of possibility some motive gets raised to an intention and that's informed bad that the system is making and that making of the open bet the representation of that is what we call free will and it seems to be paradoxical because we think that's the crucial thing is about it that it's somehow indeterministic and yet if it wasn't deterministic it would be random and of course it cannot be random because it was if it was random if just dice were being thrown in the universe randomly forces you to do things it would be meaningless so the important part of the decisions is always the deterministic stuff but it appears to be indeterministic to you because it's unpredictable because if it was predictable you wouldn't experience it as a free will decision you would experience it as just doing the necessary right thing and you see this continuum between the free will and the execution of automatic behavior when you're observing other people so for instance when you are observing your own children if you don't understand them you will use this agent model where you have a agent with a set point generator and uh the agent is doing the best it can to minimize the difference to the set point and it might be confused and uh sometimes impulsive or whatever but it's acting on its own free will and when you understand what happens in the mind of the child you see that is automatic and you can outmodel the child you can build things around the child that will lead the child to making exactly the decision that you are predicting and in under these circumstances like when you were a stage magician or somebody who is dealing uh with people that this you sell a car to and you completely understand the psychology and the impulses and the space of thoughts that this individual can have at that moment under these circumstances it makes no sense to attribute free will because it's no longer decision making under uncertainty you are already certain for them there is uncertainty but you already know what they are doing but what about for you so is this akin to like systems like cellular automata where it's deterministic but when you squint your eyes a little bit it starts look like there's agents making decisions at the higher so when you zoom out and look at the entities that are composed by the individual cells even though the there's underlying simple rules that make the system evolve in deterministic ways it looks like there's organisms making decisions is that where the illusion of free will emerges that jump and scale it's a particular type of model but this jump in scale is crucial the jump in scale happens whenever you have too many parts to count and you cannot make a model at that level and you try to find some higher level regularity and the higher level regularity is a pattern that you project into the world to make sense of it and agency is one of these patterns right you have all these cells that interact with each other and the cells in our body are set up in such a way that they benefit if their behavior is coherent which means that they act as if they were serving a common goal and which that means that they will evolve regulation mechanisms that act as if they were serving a common goal and now you can make sense of these all these cells by projecting the common goal into them right so for you then free will is an illusion no it's a model and it's a construct it's basically a model that the system is making of its own behavior and it's the best model that it can come up with under the circumstances and it can get replaced by a different model which is automatic behavior when you fully understand the mechanism under which you are acting yeah but the another word for model is what story so it's the story you're telling i mean you actually have control is there such a thing as a you and is there such a thing as you having control it's like are you manifesting your evolution as an entity in some sense the u is the model of the system that is in control it's a story that the system tells itself about somebody who is in control yeah and the contents of that model are being used to inform the behavior of the system okay so the system is completely mechanical and the system creates that story like a loom and then it uses the contents of that story to inform its actions and writes the results of that actions into the story so how's that not an illusion the story is written then or or rather we're not the writers of the story yes but we always knew that no we we don't know that when did we know that i think that's mostly a confusion about concepts the conceptual illusion in our culture comes from the idea that we live in physical reality and that we experience physical reality and that you have ideas about it and then you have this dual list interpretation where you have two substances res extensor the world that you can touch and that is made of extended things and res cognitions which is the world of ideas and in fact both of them are mental representations one is the representations of the world as a game engine that your mind generates to make sense of the perceptual data and the other one yes that's what we perceive as the physical world but we already know that the physical world is nothing like that right quantum mechanics is very different from what you and me perceive as the world the world that you and me perceive is a game engine yeah and there are no colors and sounds in the physical world they only exist in the game engine generated by your brain and then you have ideas that are not cannot be mapped onto extended regions right so the objects that have a spatial extension in the game engine are res extensor and the objects that don't have a physical extension in the game engine our ideas and they both interact in our mind to produce models of the world yep but you know when you play video games i understand that what's actually happening is zeros and ones inside of uh inside of a computer instead of a cpu and a gpu but you're still seeing like uh the rendering of that and you're still making decisions whether to shoot to turn left or to turn right if you're playing a shooter or every time you start thinking about skyrim and elder scrolls and walking around in beautiful nature and swinging a sword but it feels like you're making decisions inside that video game so even though you don't have direct access uh in terms of perception to the bits to the zeros and ones it still feels like you're making decisions and your decisions are actually feels like they're being applied all the way down to the zeros and ones yes it feels like you have control even though you don't direct access to reality so there is basically a special character in the video game that is being created by the video game engine yeah and this character is serving the aesthetics of the video game and that is you yes but i feel like you have control inside the video game like the all those like 12 year olds that kick my ass on the internet so uh for when you play the video game it doesn't really matter that they're zeros and once right you don't care about the vids of the bus you don't care about the nature of the cpu that it runs on what you care about are the properties of the game that you're playing and you hope that the cpu is good enough yes and a similar thing happens when we interact with physics the world that you and me are in is not the physical world the world that you and me are in is a dream world how close is it to the real world though we know that it's not very close but we know that the dynamics of the dream world match the dynamics of the physical world to a certain degree of resolution right the causal structure of the dreamworld is different so you see waves crashing on your feet right but there are no waves in the ocean there's only water molecules that have tangents uh between the molecules that are uh ex the result of electrons in the molecules interacting with each other aren't they like very consistent we're just seeing a very uh crude approximation isn't our dream world very consistent like to the point of being mapped directly one-to-one to the actual physical world as opposed to us being completely tricked is this is like where you have like that it's not a trick that's that's my point it's not an illusion it's a form of data compression yeah it's an attempt to deal with the dynamics of too many parts to count at the level at which we're entangled with the best model that you can find yeah so we can act in that dream world and our actions have impact in the in the real world in the physical world yes to which we don't have access yes but it's basically like accepting the fact that the software that we live in the dream that we live in is generated by something outside of this world that you and me are in so is the software deterministic and do we not have any control do we have so free will is uh having a conscious being the free will is the monkey being able to steer the elephant no it's slightly different basically in the same way as you are modeling the water molecules in the ocean that engulf your feet when you are walking on the beach as waves and there are no waves uh but only the atoms on more complicated stuff underneath the atoms and so on and you know that right you would accept yes there is a certain abstraction that happens here it's a simplification of what happens in simplification that is designed in such a way that your brain can deal with it temporarily and spatially in terms of resources and tuned for the predictive value so you can predict with some accuracy whether your feet are going to get wet or not but it's a really good approach it's a really good interface and approximation yes it's like equals mg squared is a good equations are good approximations for what they're much better approximation so to me waves is a really nice approximation what's all the complexity that's happening underneath basically it's a machine learning model that is constantly tuned to minimize surprises so it basically tries to predict as well as it can what you're going to perceive next are we talking about which is the machine learning our perception system or the dream world the machine world is a dream world is the result of the machine learning process of the perception system that's doing the compression yes and uh the model of you as an agent is not a different type of model or it's a different type but not uh not different as in its model like nature from the model of the ocean right some things are oceans some things are agents and one of these agents is using your own control model the output of your model the things that you perceive yourself as doing and that is you what about the fact that like when you're standing um and with the water on your feet and you're looking out into the vest like open water of the ocean and then there's a beautiful sunset and it well the fact that it's beautiful and then maybe you have like friends or a loved one with you and like you feel love what is that as the dream world what is that yes it's all uh happening inside of the dream okay but see the word dream makes it seem like it's not real yeah of course it's not real the physical universe is real but the physical universe is incomprehensible and it doesn't have any feeling of realness the feeling of realness that you experience gets attached to certain representations where your brain assesses this is the best model of reality that i have so the only thing that's real to you is the thing that's happening at the very base of reality like for something to be real it needs to be implemented so uh the model that you have of reality is a real in as far as it is a model right it's an appropriate description of the world to say that there are models that are being experienced but the world that you experience is not necessarily implemented there is a difference between a reality a simulation and a simulacrum the reality that we are talking about is something that fully emerges over a causally closed lowest layer the idea of physicalism is that we are in that layer that basically our world emerges over that every alternative to physicalism is a simulation theory which basically says that we are in some kind of simulation universe and the real world needs to be an apparent universe of that where the actual causal structure is right and when you look at the ocean and your own mind you are looking at a simulation that explains what you're going to see next and we are living in a simulation yes but the simulation generated by our own brains yeah and this simulation is different from the physical reality because the causal structure that is being produced what you are seeing is different from the causal structure of physics but consistent hopefully if not then you are going to end up in some kind of institution where people will take care of you because your behavior will be inconsistent right your uh behavior needs to work in such a way that it's interacting with an accurately predictive model of reality and if your brain is unable to make your model of reality predictive um you will need help so what uh what do you think about donald hoffman's argument that it doesn't have to be consistent the dream world to the the what he calls like the interface uh to the actual physical reality where there could be evolution i think he makes an evolutionary argument which is like it could be an evolutionary advantage to have the dream world drift away from physical reality i think that only works if you have tenure as long as you are still interacting with the ground tools your model needs to be somewhat predictive well in some sense humans have achieved a kind of tenure in the animal kingdom at some point we became too big to fail so we became postmodernist it all makes sense the version of reality that we like oh man okay yeah but basically you can do magic you can change your assessment of reality but eventually uh reality is going to come bite you in the s if it's not predictive do you have a sense of what is that base layer physical reality you have like uh so you have these attempts at the theories of everything the very very small of like strength theory or what um stephen wolfram talks about with a hyper grass these are these tiny tiny tiny tiny objects and then there is more like quantum mechanics that's talking about objects that are much larger but still very very very tiny do you have a sense of where the tiniest thing is that is like at the lowest level the turtle at the very bottom do you have a sense i don't think that you can talk about where it is because space is emergent over the activity of these things so space uh the coordinates only exist in relation to the things other things and so you could in some sense abstract it into locations that can hold information and trajectories that the information can take between the different locations and this is how we construct our notion of space yeah and uh physicists uh usually have a notion of space that is continuous and this is a point where i tend to agree with people like stephen warfram who are very skeptical of the geometric notions i think that geometry is the dynamics of too many parts to count and when there are no infinities if there were two infinities you would be running into contradictions which is in some sense what uh google and turing discovered in response to hilbert's call so there are no infinities there are no infinities fake there is unboundedness but if you have a language that talks about infinity at some point the language is going to contradict itself which means it's no longer valid in order to deal with infinities and mathematics you have to postulate the existence in uh initially you cannot construct the infinities and that's an issue right you cannot build up an infinity from zero but in practice you never do this right when you perform calculations you only look at the dynamics of too many parts to count and usually these numbers are not that large they're not googles or something the big the infinities that we are dealing with in our universe are mathematically speaking relatively small integers and um still what we're looking at is dynamics where um a trillion things behave similar to 100 trillion things or something that is very very large because they're converging and these convergent dynamics these operators this is what we deal with when we are doing the geometry right geometry is stuff where we can pretend that it's continuous because uh as if we subdivide the space sufficiently fine grained these things approach a certain dynamic and this approached dynamic that is what we mean by it but i don't think that infinity would work so to speak that you would know the last digit of pi and that you have a physical process that rests on knowing the last digit of pi yeah that that could be just a peculiar quark of human cognition that we like discrete discrete makes sense to us infinity doesn't so in terms of our intuitions no the issue is that uh everything that we think about uh needs to be expressed in some kind of mental language not not necessarily a natural language but some kind of mathematical language that your neurons can speak that refers to something in the world and what we have discovered is that uh we cannot construct a notion of infinity without running into contradictions which means that such a language is no longer valid and i suspect this is what made photographers so unhappy when somebody came up with the notion of irrational numbers before it was time right there's this miss that he had this person killed when he blapped out the secret that not everything can be expressed as a ratio between two numbers but there are there are numbers between the ratios the world was not ready for this and i think he was right that has confused mathematicians uh very seriously because these numbers are not values they're functions right so you can calculate these functions to a certain degree of approximation but you cannot pretend that pi has actually a value pi is a function that would generally approach this value to some degree but nothing in the world rests on knowing pie uh how much does how important is this distinction between discreet and continuous uh for you to get to the because there's a i mean in discussion of your favorite flavor of the theory of everything there's a few on the table so there's string theory there's a particular there's a loop quantum gravity which focus on one particular unification uh there's there's just a bunch of favorite flavors of different people trying to uh propose a theory of everything uh eric weinstein and a bunch of people throughout history and then of course stephen wolfram who i think is one of the only people doing a discrete no no there's a bunch of physicists who do this right now and okay like um topholy and tomasello and um the digital physics is something that is i think growing in popularity but uh the main reason why this is interesting is because it uh it's important sometimes to settle disagreements i don't think that you need infinities as or at all and you never needed them you can always deal with very large numbers and you can do it with limits right you're fine with doing that you don't need any kind of infinity you can build your computer algebra systems just as well without believing in infinity in the first place you're okay with limits yeah so basically a limit means that something is behaving pretty much the same if you make the number larger right because it's converging to a certain value and at some point the difference becomes measurable and you can no longer measure it and uh in this sense you have things that uh yeah if every ngon which is has enough corners then it's going to behave like a circle at some point right and it's only going to be in some kind of esoteric thing that cannot exist in the physical universe that you would be talking about this perfect circle and now it turns out that it also wouldn't work in mathematics because you cannot construct mathematics that has infinite resolution without running into contradictions so that is itself not that important because we never did that right it's just a thing that some people thought we could and this leads to confusion so for instance roger penrose uses this as an argument to say that there are certain things that mathematicians can do dealing with infinities and by extension our mind can do that computers cannot do yeah he he talks about that there's the human mind can do certain mathematical things that the computer as defined by the universal touring machine cannot yes what so that it has to do with infinity yes it's one of the things so he is basically pointing at the fact that there are things that are possible in the mathematical mind and in pure mathematics that are not possible in uh machines that can be constructed in the physical universe and because he's an honest guy he thinks this means that uh present physics cannot explain operations that happen in our mind do you think he's right and uh so let's let's leave his discussion of consciousness aside for the moment do you think he's right about just what he's basically referring to as intelligence so are is the human mind fundamentally more capable as a thinking machine than a universal touring machine no but so he's suggesting that right so our mind is actually less than a turing machine there can be no touring machine because it's defined as having an infinite tape and we always only have a finite tape but you can perform finally many operations yes it can do the kind of computation the yes the touring machine cannot and that's because he thinks that our minds can do operations that have infinite resolution in some sense and i don't think that's the case our minds are just able to discover these limit operators over too many parts to count what about his idea that consciousness is more uh more than a computation so it's more than something that uh a touring machine can can do so again saying that there's something special about our mind they cannot be replicated in the machine the issue is that i don't even know how to construct a language to express this statement correctly well the the the basic statement is there's a there's a human experience that includes intelligence that includes self-awareness that includes the hard problem of consciousness and the question is can that be fully simulated in the computer in the mathematical model of the computer as we understand it today rajapanos says no so the the uh universal turing machine cannot simulate the universe so the interesting question is uh and you have to ask him this is why not what is this specific thing that cannot be modeled and when i looked at his writings and i haven't read all of it but when i read for instance um the section that he writes in the introduction to and wrote to infinity the thing that he specifically refers to is the way in which human minds deal with infinities and that itself can i think easily be deconstructed a lot of uh people feel that our experience cannot be explained in a mechanical way and therefore it needs to be different and i concur our experience is not mechanical our experience is simulated it exists only in a simulation the only assimilation can be conscious physical systems cannot be conscious because they're only mechanical cells cannot be conscious neurons cannot be conscious brains cannot be conscious people cannot be conscious as far as you if you understand them as physical systems what can be conscious is the story of a system in the world where you write all these things into the story you have experiences for the same reason that a character novel has experiences because it's written into the story and now the system is acting on that story and it's not a story that is written in a natural language it's written in a perceptual language in this multimedia language of the game engine and in there you write in what kind of experience you have and what this means for the behavior of the system for your behavior tendencies for your focus for your attention for your experience of valence and so on and this is being used to inform the behavior of the system in the next step and then the story updates with the reactions of the system and the changes in the world and so on and you live inside of that model you don't live inside of the physical reality and i mean just just to linger on it like you see okay yeah it's in the perceptual language the multimodal perceptual language that's the experience that's what consciousness is within that within that model within that story but do you do you have agency when you play a video game you can turn left and you can turn right in that story so in that dream world how much control do you is there such a thing as you in that story like is it right to say the main character you know everybody's npcs and then there's the main character and you're controlling the main character or is that an illusion is there a main character that you're controlling i'm getting to the point of like the free will point imagine that you are building a robot that plays soccer yeah and you've been to mit computer science you basically know how to do that right and so uh you would say the robot is an agent that solves the control problem how to get the ball into the goal and it needs to perceive the world and the world is disturbing him and trying to do this right so he has to control many variables to make that happen and to project itself and the ball into the future and understand its position on the field relative to the ball and so on in the uh position of its limbs or in in the space around it and so on so it needs to have an adequate model that abstracting reality in a useful way and you could say that this robot does have agency over what it's doing in some sense and the model is going to be a control model and inside of that control model you can possibly get to a point where this thing is sufficiently abstract to discover its own agency our current robots don't do that they don't have a unified model of the universe but there is not a reason why we shouldn't be getting there at some point in the not too distant future and once that happens you will notice that the uh robot tells a story about the robot playing soccer so the robot will experience itself playing soccer in a simulation of the world that it uses to construct a model of the locations of it lacks on and limbs in space on the field with relationship to the ball and it's not going to be at the level of the molecules it will be an abstraction that is exactly at the level that is most suitable for past planning of the movements of the robot right it's going to be a high level abstraction but a very useful one that is as predictive as we can make it and in that side of that story there is a model of the agency of that system so this model can accurately predict that the contents of the model are going to be driving the behavior of the robot in the immediate future but there's the hard problem of consciousness which i would also there's a subjective experience of free will as well that i'm not sure where the robot gets that where that little leap is because for me right now everything i imagine with that robot as it gets more and more and more sophisticated the agency comes from the programmer of the robot still of what was programmed in you could probably do an end-to-end learning system you maybe need to give it a few prayers so you nudge the architecture in the right direction that it converges more quickly but ultimately uh discovering the suitable hyper parameters of the architecture is also only a search process right and as the search process was evolution that has informed our brain architecture so we can converge in a single lifetime on useful interaction with the world and if we define hyper parameters broadly so it's not just this the uh the parameters that control this end-to-end learning system but the entirety of the design of the robot like the there's you have to remove the human completely from the picture and then in order to build the robot you have to create an entire universe because you have to go you can't just shortcut evolution you have to go from the very beginning in order for it to have because i feel like there's always a human pulling the strings um and that makes it seem like the robot is cheating it's getting a shortcut to consciousness when you are looking at the current boston dynamics robots it doesn't look as if there is somebody pulling the strings it doesn't look like cheating anymore okay so let's go there because i gotta talk to you about this so obviously with the case of boston dynamics as you may or may not know it's always either hard coded or remote controlled there's no intelligence i don't know how the current generation of boston dynamics robots works but what i've been told about the previous ones was that it's basically all cybernetic control which means you still have uh feedback mechanisms and so on but it's not uh deep learning for the most part as it's currently done it's for the most part just identifying a control hierarchy that is congruent to the limbs that exist and the parameters that need to be optimized for the movement of these limbs and then there is a convergence progress so it's basically just regression that you would need to control this but again i don't know whether that's true that's just what i've been told about how they work we have to separate several levels of discussions here so the only thing they do is pretty sophisticated control no with no machine learning in order to be to maintain balance or to write itself it's a control problem in terms of using the actuators to when it's pushed or when it steps on a thing that's uneven how to always maintain balance yes and there's a tricky like set of heuristics around that but uh that's the only goal everything you see boston dynamics doing in terms of that to us humans is compelling which is any kind of um higher order movement like turning uh wiggling its butt uh like uh you know uh jumping back on its two feet dancing the dancing is even worse because dancing is hard coded in it's um it's choreographed by humans there's choreography software so like there is no of all that high level movement there's no anything that you can call certainly can't call ai but there's no uh even like basic heuristics it's all hard coded in and yet we humans immediately project agency onto them which is which is fascinating so the gap here is uh it doesn't necessarily have agency well it has a cybernetic control and the cybernetic control means you have a hierarchy of feedback loops that keep the behavior in certain boundaries so the robot doesn't fall over and it's able to perform the movements and the choreography cannot really happen with motion capture because the robot would fall over because the physics of the robot the weight distribution and so on is different from the weight distribution in the human body so if you were using the directly motion captured movements of the human body to project it into this robot it wouldn't work you can do this with the computer animation it will look a little bit off but who cares but if you want to correct for the physics you need to basically tell the robot where it should move its limbs and then the control algorithm is going to approximate a solution that makes it possible within the physics of the robot and you have to find um the basic solution for making that happen and there's probably going to be some regression necessary to get the control architecture to to make these movements but those two layers are separate yes the the the thing the higher level instruction of what how you should move and where you should move is that so i expect that the control level of these robots at some level is dumb this is just the physical control movement the motor architecture but uh it's a relatively smart motor architecture it's just that there is no high level deliberation about what decisions to make necessarily right but see it doesn't feel like um free will no that was not where i was trying to get to i think that in our own uh body we have that too so we have a certain thing that is basically just a cybernetic control architecture that is moving our limbs and deep learning can help in discovering such an architecture if you don't have it in the first place if you already know your hardware you can maybe handcraft it but if you don't know your hardware you can search for such an architecture and this work already existed in the 80s and 90s people were starting to search for control architectures by motor babbling and so on and just use reinforcement learning architectures to discover such a thing and now imagine that you have the cybernetic control architecture already inside of you and you extend this a little bit so you are seeking out food for instance or rest or and so on and you get to have a baby at some point and now you add more and more control layers to this and the system is reverse engineering its own control architecture and builds a high level model to synchronize the pursuit of very different conflicting goals and this is how i think you get to purposes purposes are models of your goals the goals may be intrinsic as the result of the different set point violations that you have hunger and thirst for very different things and rest and pain avoidance and so on and you put all these things together and eventually you need to come up with a strategy to synchronize them all and you don't need uh just to do this alone by yourself because we are state building organisms we cannot function in the isolation the way that homo sapiens is set up so our own behavior only makes sense when you zoom out very far into a society or even into ecosystemic intelligence on the planet and our place in it so the individual behavior only makes sense in these larger contexts and we have a number of priors built into us so we are behaving as if we are acting on these high level goals pretty much right from the start and eventually in the course of our life we can reverse engineer the goals that we are acting on what actually are our higher level purposes and the more we understand that the more our behavior makes sense but this is all at this point complex stories within stories that are driving our behavior yeah i just don't know how big of a leap it is to start uh create a system that's able to tell stories within stories like how big of a leap that is from where currently boston dynamics is or any robot that's operating in the physical space that and that leap might be big if it requires to solve the hard problem of consciousness which is telling a hell of a good story i suspect that um consciousness itself is relatively simple what's hard is perception and the interface between perception and reasoning that's for instance the idea of the consciousness prior that would be built into such a system by uh joshua bangio and uh what he describes and i think that's accurate is that our own model of the world can be described through something like an energy function the energy function is modeling the contradictions that exist within the model at any given point and you try to minimize these contradictions the tangents in the model and to do this you need to sometimes test things you need to conditionally disambiguate figure and ground you need to just distinguish whether this is true or that is true and so on eventually you get to an interpretation but you will need to manually depress a few points in your model to let it snap into a state that makes sense and this function that tries to get the biggest dip in the energy function in your model according to joshua bangio is related to consciousness it's a low dimensional discrete function that tries to maximize this dip in the energy function i yeah i think i would need to dig into details because i think the way he uses the word consciousness is more akin to like self-awareness like modeling yourself within the world as opposed to the subjective experience the hard problem no it's not even the self is in the world the self is the agent and you don't need to be aware of yourself in order to be conscious the self is just a particular content that you can have but you don't have to have right you can be conscious in uh for instance a dream at night or during a meditation state but you don't have a self right where you're just aware of the fact that you are aware and what we mean by consciousness and the colloquial sense is largely this reflexive self-awareness that we become aware of the fact that you're paying attention that we are the thing that pays attention we are the thing that pays attention right i don't see where uh the uh awareness that we're aware the the heart problem doesn't feel like it's solved i mean they they're they're it it's called a hard problem for a reason because it seems like there needs to be a major leap yeah i think the major leap is to understand how it is possible that a machine can dream that the physical system is able to create a representation that the physical system is acting on and that is spun force and so on but once you accept the fact that you are not in physics but that you exist inside of the story i think the mystery disappears everything is possible in a statement exists inside the story okay so your consciousness is being written into the story the fact that you experience things is written to the story you ask yourself is this real what i'm seeing and your brain writes into the story yes it's real so what about the perception of consciousness so to me you look conscious so um the illusion of consciousness the demonstration of consciousness i ask for the the legged robot how do we make this legged robot conscious so there's two things and maybe you can tell me if they're neighboring ideas one is actually make it conscious and the other is make it appear conscious to others are those related uh let's ask from the other direction what would it take to make you not conscious so when you are thinking about how you perceive the world can you decide to switch from looking at qualia to looking at representational states and it turns out you can yeah there is a particular way in which you can look at the world and recognize its machine nature including your own and in that state you don't have that conscious experience in this way anymore it becomes apparent as a representation everything becomes opaque and i think this thing that you recognize everything as a representation this is typically what we mean with enlightenment states and yeah you can't have a motivational level but it you can also do this on the experiential level and the perceptual level see but then i can come back to a conscious state okay i particularly i'm referring to the social aspect that the demonstration of consciousness is a really nice thing at a party when you're trying to meet a new person it's it's a nice thing to to to know that they're conscious and they can um how i don't know how fundamental consciousness is in human interaction but it seems like to be at least uh an important part and i i asked that in the same kind of way for robots you know in order to create a rich compelling human robot interaction it feels like there needs to be elements of consciousness within that interaction my cat is obviously conscious and so my cat can do this party trick she also knows that i am conscious be able to have feedback about the fact that we are both acting on models of our own awareness the question is how hard is it for uh the robot artificially created robot to achieve cat level and party tricks yes so the issue for me is currently not so much on how to build a system that creates a story about a robot that lives in the world but to make an adequate representation of the world and the model model that you and me have is a unified one it's verb one where you basically make sense of everything that you can perceive every feature in the world that enters your perception can be relationally mapped to a unified model of everything and we don't have an ai that is able to construct such a unified model yet so you need that unified model to do the party trick yes i think that uh you it doesn't make sense if this thing is conscious but not in the same universe as you because you could not relate to each other so what's the process would you say of engineering consciousness in the machine like what are the ideas here so uh you probably want to have some kind of perceptual system this perceptual system is a processing agent that is able to track sensory data and predict the next frame and the sensory data from the previous frames of the sensory data in the current state of the system so the current state of the system is perception instrumental to predicting what happens next and this means you build lots and lots of functions that take all the blips that you feel on your skin and that you see on your retina or that you hear and puts them into a set of relationships that allows you to predict what kind of sensory data what kind of sensor of blips your vector of blips you're going to perceive in the next frame right this is tuned and it's constantly tuned until it gets as accurate as it can you build a very accurate prediction mechanism that is step one of the perception so first you predict then you perceive and see the error in your prediction and you have to do two things to make that happen one is you have to build a network of relationships that are constraints that take all the variants in the world to put each of the variances into a variable variable that is connected with relationships to other variables and these relationships are computable functions that constrain each other so when you see a nose that points a certain direction in space you have a constraint that says there should be a face nearby that has the same direction right and if that is not the case you have some kind of contradiction that you need to resolve because it's probably not a nose what you're looking at it just looks like one so you have to reinterpret the data and until you get to a point where your model converges and this process of making the sensory data fit into your model structure is what prg calls the assimilation and accommodation is the change of the models where you change your model such a way that you can assimilate everything so you're you're talking about building a hell of an awesome perception system that's able to do prediction and perception and correct and improvement wait just uh if you had to wait there's more yes there's more so the first thing that we want to do is we want to minimize the contradictions in the model yes and of course it's very easy to make a model in which you minimize the contradictions just by allowing that it can be in many many possible states right so if you increase degrees of freedom you will have fewer contradictions but you also want to reduce the degrees of freedom because degrees of freedom mean uncertainty you want your model to reduce uncertainty as much as possible but reducing uncertainty is expensive so you have to have a trade-off between minimizing contradictions and reducing uncertainty and you have only finite amount of compute and experimental time and effort available to reduce uncertainty in the world so you need to assign value to what you observe so you need some kind of motivational system that is estimating what you should be looking at and what you should be thinking about it how you should be applying your resources to model what that is right so you need to have something like uh convergence links that tell you how to get from the present state of the model to the next one you need to have these compatibility links that tell you which constraints exist and which constraint violations exist and you need to have some kind of motivational system that tells you what to pay attention to so now we have a second agent next to the perceptual age we have a motivational agent this is a cybernetic system that is modeling what the system needs what's important for the system and that interacts with the perceptual system to maximize the expected reward and you're saying a motivational system is some kind of like what is it a higher level narrative over some lower level no it's just your brainstem stuff the limbic system stuff that tells you okay now you should get something to eat because i've just measured your dual blood sugar like motivational system like the lower levels yes like hungry yes but there's basically a physiological needs and some cognitive needs and some social needs and they all interact and they're all implemented at different parts in your nervous system as the motivational system but they're basically cybernetic feedback loops it's not that complicated it's just a lot of code and so you now have a motivational agent that makes your robot go for the ball or that makes your worm go to eat food and so on and you have the perceptual system that lets it predict that environment so it's able to solve that control problem to some degree and now what we learned is that it's very hard to build a machine learning system that looks at all the data simultaneously to see what kind of relationships could exist between them so you need to selectively model the world you need to figure out where can i make the biggest difference if i would put the following things together sometimes you find a gradient for that right when you have a gradient you don't need to remember where you came from you just follow the gradient until it doesn't get any better but if you have a word where the problems are discontinuous and the search spaces are discontinuous you need to retain memory of what you explored and you need to construct a plan of what to explore next and this thing that means<br><!-- wp:image {"id":1776,"sizeSlug":"large","linkDestination":"none"} -->rn<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img class="wp-image-1776" src="https://en.videoencontexto.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Joscha_Bach_Nature_of_Reality_Dreams_and_Consciousness__Lex_Fridman_Podcast_212_rIpUf-Vy2JA.jpg" alt="Joscha Bach: Nature of Reality, Dreams, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #212" /></figure>rn<!-- /wp:image -->[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]