

From Computation to Consciousness [video] - Audiophilip
http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6573_-_en_-_saal_2_-_201412281130_-_from_computation_to_consciousness_-_joscha.html

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Animats
Papers and talks about "consciousness" are usually very bad. This is better
than most, but not great. The beginning is a rehash of Philosophy 101, but
after a while he gets into neural models of visual processing in the brain
which can be implemented in software. That part is quite good. That alone
would have been a good talk.

Around 13 minutes in, after mentioning and dismissing linguistic
representations, he starts talking about simulation-type representations of
the external world. This is progress. Historically, there's been an obsession
with linguistic (or worse, predicate-calculus) models. Simulation-type
representations, ones which can answer "what happens next" or "what if"
questions, But he doesn't develop that concept further.

Then, around 20 minutes in, he gets off on dreams and meditation, and "how is
it possible to be conscious without a self", and "free will is a social
notion", none of which is helpful. By minute 26, he's off on psychedelic
experiences and love. Around minute 30, he's off on dualism, questions like
"is the mind part of the universe", and "could we build a mind in Minecraft".
Then there's solipsism, and "are we living in a simulation", and whether it
matters.

"Preference criteria for suitable encoding", at minute 34, starts to explore
computational metaphysics, the nature of reality, and other deep subjects.
Shallowly.

There's some good stuff in here, but it's not sorted out between what's
actually known, what's conjectured, and what's speculated. If you stop
watching at minute 20, you'll have seen all the good stuff. The philosophical
excess baggage can be skipped.

I would have liked to see more on simulation-type representations of the real
world. That's where "common sense" is probably implemented. (A useful
definition of common sense, from a robotics or animal perspective, is that it
is about getting through the next ten seconds or so of life without screwing
up big-time. As a practical matter, we really need to get a good handle on
that to build useful robots for unstructured environments. Google is trying to
do this for automatic driving, apparently as a big-data problem.)

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danbruc
Is there a way to easily get rid of the German translations? I am German but
unfortunately the translators are not very good and it is - at least for me -
harder to listen to this language mix than to the English talk.

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bigphishy
What an insightful and refreshing lecture. Thanks for sharing this. The theory
about why the mind creates a sense of self, in order to facilitate higher
learning, is something I can relate to and helps me understand.

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zan2434
Wait he just claimed the universe is computable because it produces regular
data we can encode. Is that necessarily the case? Can't you claim that our
senses just produce regular data that we can encode?

