Machine Dreams – Dreaming Machines

Watch the 5th installment of the series From Computation to Consciousness by Joscha Bach below.

Artificial Intelligence provides a conceptual framework to understand mind and universe in new ways, clearing the obstacles that hindered the progress of philosophy and psychology. Let us see how AI can help us to understand how our minds create the experience of a universe.

Unlike the machine learning systems of the past, minds are not just classifiers or policy optimizers. Minds are not accumulators of knowledge about the world. Minds are generative systems: they actively produce the world that we subjectively experience. Ordinary day-time experiences are in fact dreams constrained by sensory data. This simple insight of contemporary cognitive science turns realist notions of embodiment on their head. The idea of the brain as a dreaming machine opens a way to understand the nature of our experiences.

This is the proposed fourth installment of a series of presentations about using AI perspectives to understand minds and their relationship to the universe. “How to build a mind” (30c3) suggested specifications for an architecture of cognition; “From computation to consciousness” (31c3) explored the mind’s computational foundations; “Computational metapsychology” (32c3) discussed the individual and social construction of meaning. “Machine dreams” sketches how the computational machinery of our brains leads to our experience a subjective world. We will look at the conductor theory of consciousness, some of the mental structures contributing to our models of self and world, and the unreasonable effectiveness of neural processes in modeling physics.

The Chaos Communication Congress Talks

In 2013, I attended the 30c3 to deliver a lecture on how to build an Artificial Intelligence to an audience of hackers. The Chaos Communication Congress is a fascinating venue, because it combines very smart and curious attendants with an opportunity to present ideas in a format that is unconstrained by our usual academic habits. It was so not only a lot of fun, but also helpful to express a lot of ideas that I would not have fixated anywhere else, and so I continued to produce presentations in the following years.

The xxC3 talks are attempts at answering the questions of the me that entered academia to learn about what minds are, and how they relate to the world. I still have these questions, but I have dug a few tunnels into the bedrock of my ignorance over the years, and I would like to show you where they have led me.