WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.044 preroll music 00:00:09.044 --> 00:00:14.049 Herald: Our next talk is going to be about AI and it's going to be about proper AI. 00:00:14.049 --> 00:00:17.730 It's not going to be about deep learning or buzz word bingo. 00:00:17.730 --> 00:00:22.590 It's going to be about actual psychology. It's going to be about computational metapsychology. 00:00:22.590 --> 00:00:25.750 And now please welcome Joscha! 00:00:25.750 --> 00:00:33.050 applause 00:00:33.050 --> 00:00:35.620 Joscha: Thank you. 00:00:35.620 --> 00:00:37.710 I'm interested in understanding how the mind works, 00:00:37.710 --> 00:00:42.640 and I believe that the most foolproof perspective at looking ... of looking at minds is to understand 00:00:42.640 --> 00:00:46.600 that they are systems that if you saw patterns at them you find meaning. 00:00:46.600 --> 00:00:51.700 And you find meaning in those in very particular ways and this is what makes us who we are. 00:00:51.700 --> 00:00:55.239 So they way to study and understand who we are in my understanding is 00:00:55.239 --> 00:01:01.149 to build models of information processing that constitutes our minds. 00:01:01.149 --> 00:01:05.640 Last year about the same time, I've answered the four big questions of philosophy: 00:01:05.640 --> 00:01:08.510 "Whats the nature of reality?", "What can be known?", "Who are we?", 00:01:08.510 --> 00:01:14.650 "What should we do?" So now, how can I top this? 00:01:14.650 --> 00:01:18.720 applause 00:01:18.720 --> 00:01:22.849 I'm going to give you the drama that divided a planet. 00:01:22.849 --> 00:01:26.470 Some of a very, very big events, that happened in the course of last year, 00:01:26.470 --> 00:01:30.080 so I couldn't tell you about it before. 00:01:30.080 --> 00:01:38.489 What color is the dress laughsapplause 00:01:38.489 --> 00:01:44.720 I mean ahmm... If you have.. do not have any mental defects you can clearly see it's white 00:01:44.720 --> 00:01:46.550 and gold. Right? 00:01:46.550 --> 00:01:48.720 [voices from audience] 00:01:48.720 --> 00:01:53.009 Turns out, ehmm.. most people seem to have mental defects and say it is blue and black. 00:01:53.009 --> 00:01:57.500 I have no idea why. Well Ok, I have an idea, why that is the case. 00:01:57.500 --> 00:02:01.170 Ehmm, I guess that you got too, it has to do with color renormalization 00:02:01.170 --> 00:02:04.720 and color renormalization happens differently apparently in different people. 00:02:04.720 --> 00:02:09.000 So we have different wireing to renormalize the white balance. 00:02:09.000 --> 00:02:12.650 And it seems to work in real world situations in pretty much the same way, 00:02:12.650 --> 00:02:18.000 but not necessarily for photographs. Which have only very small fringe around them, 00:02:18.000 --> 00:02:20.600 which gives you hint about the lighting situation. 00:02:20.600 --> 00:02:27.000 And that's why you get this huge divergencies, which is amazing! 00:02:27.000 --> 00:02:29.660 So what we see that our minds can not know 00:02:29.660 --> 00:02:33.250 objective truths in any way. Outside of mathematics. 00:02:33.250 --> 00:02:36.340 They can generate meaning though. 00:02:36.340 --> 00:02:38.760 How does this work? 00:02:38.760 --> 00:02:42.010 I did robotic soccer for a while, and there you have the situation, 00:02:42.010 --> 00:02:45.150 that you have a bunch of robots, that are situated on a playing field. 00:02:45.150 --> 00:02:48.480 And they have a model of what goes on in the playing field. 00:02:48.480 --> 00:02:52.050 Physics generates data for their sensors. They read the bits of the sensors. 00:02:52.050 --> 00:02:55.900 And then they use them to.. erghmm update the world model. 00:02:55.900 --> 00:02:59.020 And sometimes we didn't want to take the whole playing field along, 00:02:59.020 --> 00:03:03.380 and the physical robots, because they are expensive and heavy and so on. 00:03:03.380 --> 00:03:06.480 Instead if you just want to improve the learning and the game play of the robots 00:03:06.480 --> 00:03:07.800 you can use the simulations. 00:03:07.800 --> 00:03:11.200 So we've wrote a computer simulation of the playing field and the physics, and so on, 00:03:11.200 --> 00:03:15.210 that generates pretty some the same data, and put the robot mind into the simulator 00:03:15.210 --> 00:03:17.040 robot body, and it works just as well. 00:03:17.040 --> 00:03:20.590 That is, if you the robot, because you can not know the difference if you are the robot. 00:03:20.590 --> 00:03:24.460 You can not know what's out there. The only thing that you get to see is what is the structure 00:03:24.460 --> 00:03:27.530 of the data at you system bit interface. 00:03:27.530 --> 00:03:30.090 And then you can derive model from this. 00:03:30.090 --> 00:03:32.960 And this is pretty much the situation that we are in. 00:03:32.960 --> 00:03:38.180 That is, we are minds that are somehow computational, 00:03:38.180 --> 00:03:40.700 they are able to find regularity in patterns, 00:03:40.700 --> 00:03:44.530 and they are... we.. seem to have access to something that is full of regularity, 00:03:44.530 --> 00:03:46.630 so we can make sense out of it. 00:03:46.630 --> 00:03:48.930 [ghulp, ghulp] 00:03:48.930 --> 00:03:52.800 Now, if you discover that you are in the same situation as these robots, 00:03:52.800 --> 00:03:56.180 basically you discover that you are some kind of apparently biological robot, 00:03:56.180 --> 00:03:58.530 that doesn't have direct access to the world of concepts. 00:03:58.530 --> 00:04:02.140 That has never actually seen matter and energy and other people. 00:04:02.140 --> 00:04:04.890 All it got to see was little bits of information, 00:04:04.890 --> 00:04:06.270 that were transmitted through the nerves, 00:04:06.270 --> 00:04:07.870 and the brain had to make sense of them, 00:04:07.870 --> 00:04:10.470 by counting them in elaborate ways. 00:04:10.470 --> 00:04:12.720 What's the best model of the world that you can have with this? 00:04:12.720 --> 00:04:16.530 What will the state of affairs, what's the system that you are in? 00:04:16.530 --> 00:04:20.920 And what are the best algorithms that you should be using, to fix your world model. 00:04:20.920 --> 00:04:23.310 And this question is pretty old. 00:04:23.310 --> 00:04:27.750 And I think that has been answered for the first time by Ray Solomonoff in the 1960. 00:04:27.750 --> 00:04:30.840 He has discovered an algorithm, that you can apply when you discover 00:04:30.840 --> 00:04:33.540 that you are an robot, and all you have is data. 00:04:33.540 --> 00:04:34.870 What is the world like? 00:04:34.870 --> 00:04:40.990 And this algorithm is basically a combination of induction and Occam's razor. 00:04:40.990 --> 00:04:45.710 And we can mathematically prove that we can not do better than Solomonoff induction. 00:04:45.710 --> 00:04:51.380 Unfortunately, Solomonoff induction is not quite computable. 00:04:51.380 --> 00:04:54.450 But everything that we are going to do is some... is going to be some approximation 00:04:54.450 --> 00:04:55.820 of Salomonoff induction. 00:04:55.820 --> 00:04:59.400 So our concepts can not really refer to the facts in the world out there. 00:04:59.400 --> 00:05:02.380 We do not get the truth by referring to stuff out there, in the world. 00:05:02.380 --> 00:05:07.960 We get meaning by suitably encoding the patterns at our systemic interface. 00:05:07.960 --> 00:05:12.270 And AI has recently made a huge progress in encoding data at perceptual interfaces. 00:05:12.270 --> 00:05:15.900 Deep learning is about using a stacked hierarchy of feature detectors. 00:05:15.900 --> 00:05:21.280 That is, we use pattern detectors and we build them into a networks that are arranged in 00:05:21.280 --> 00:05:23.030 hundreds of layers. 00:05:23.030 --> 00:05:26.500 And then we adjust the links between these layers. 00:05:26.500 --> 00:05:29.380 Usually some kind of... using some kind of gradient descent. 00:05:29.380 --> 00:05:33.220 And we can use this to classify for instance images and parts of speech. 00:05:33.220 --> 00:05:37.950 So, we get to features that are more and more complex, they started as very, very simple patterns. 00:05:37.950 --> 00:05:41.290 And then get more and more complex, until we get to object categories. 00:05:41.290 --> 00:05:44.199 And now this systems are able in image recognition task, 00:05:44.199 --> 00:05:47.480 to approach performance that is very similar to human performance. 00:05:47.480 --> 00:05:52.040 Also what is nice is that it seems to be somewhat similar to what the brain seems to be doing 00:05:52.040 --> 00:05:53.740 in visual processing. 00:05:53.740 --> 00:05:57.570 And if you take the activation in different levels of these networks and you 00:05:57.570 --> 00:06:01.430 erghm... improve the... that... erghmm... enhance this activation a little bit, what 00:06:01.430 --> 00:06:03.500 you get is stuff that look very psychedelic. 00:06:03.500 --> 00:06:09.620 Which may be similar to what happens, if you put certain illegal substances into people, 00:06:09.620 --> 00:06:13.650 and enhance the activity on certain layers of their visual processing. 00:06:13.650 --> 00:06:21.540 [BROKEN AUDIO]If you want to classify the differences what we do if we want quantify 00:06:21.540 --> 00:06:33.030 this you filter out all the invariences in the data. 00:06:33.030 --> 00:06:36.360 The pose that she has, the lighting, the dress that she is on.. has on, 00:06:36.360 --> 00:06:38.020 her facial expression and so on. 00:06:38.020 --> 00:06:42.900 And then we go to only to this things that is left after we've removed all the nuance data. 00:06:42.900 --> 00:06:47.410 But what if we... erghmm want to get to something else, 00:06:47.410 --> 00:06:49.850 for instance if we want to understand poses. 00:06:49.850 --> 00:06:53.240 Could be for instance that we have several dancers and we want to understand what they 00:06:53.240 --> 00:06:54.400 have in common. 00:06:54.400 --> 00:06:58.330 So our best bet is not just to have a single classification based filtering, 00:06:58.330 --> 00:07:01.199 but instead what we want to have is to take the low level input 00:07:01.199 --> 00:07:05.180 and get a whole universe of features, that is interrelated. 00:07:05.180 --> 00:07:07.220 So we have different levels of interrelations. 00:07:07.220 --> 00:07:08.960 At the lowest levels we have percepts. 00:07:08.960 --> 00:07:11.580 On the slightly higher level we have simulations. 00:07:11.580 --> 00:07:16.920 And on even higher level we have concept landscape. 00:07:16.920 --> 00:07:19.300 How does this representation by simulation work? 00:07:19.300 --> 00:07:22.229 Now imagine you want to understand sound. 00:07:22.229 --> 00:07:23.669 [Ghulp] 00:07:23.669 --> 00:07:26.710 If you are a brain and you want to understand sound you need to model it. 00:07:26.710 --> 00:07:31.070 Unfortunatly we can not really model sound with neurons, because sound goes up to 20kHz, 00:07:31.070 --> 00:07:36.660 or if you are old like me maybe to 12 kHz. 20 kHz is what babies could do. 00:07:36.660 --> 00:07:41.240 And... neurons do not want to do 20 kHz. That's way too fast for them. 00:07:41.240 --> 00:07:43.250 They like something like 20 Hz. 00:07:43.250 --> 00:07:45.590 So what do you do? You need to make a Fourier transform. 00:07:45.590 --> 00:07:49.650 The Fourier transform measures the amount of energy at different frequencies. 00:07:49.650 --> 00:07:52.500 And because you can not do it with neurons, you need to do it in hardware. 00:07:52.500 --> 00:07:54.180 And turns out this is exactly what we are doing. 00:07:54.180 --> 00:07:59.860 We have this cochlea which is this snail like thing in our ears, 00:07:59.860 --> 00:08:06.669 and what it does, it transforms energy of sound in different frequency intervals into 00:08:06.669 --> 00:08:08.009 energy measurments. 00:08:08.009 --> 00:08:10.479 And then gives you something like what you see here. 00:08:10.479 --> 00:08:12.550 And this is something that the brain can model, 00:08:12.550 --> 00:08:16.210 so we can get a neurosimulator that tries to recreate this patterns. 00:08:16.210 --> 00:08:21.370 And we can predict the next input from the cochlea that then understand the sound. 00:08:21.370 --> 00:08:23.410 Of course if you want to understand music, 00:08:23.410 --> 00:08:25.160 we have to go beyond understanding sound. 00:08:25.160 --> 00:08:29.340 We have to understand the transformations that sound can have if you play it at different pitch. 00:08:29.340 --> 00:08:33.599 We have to arrange the sound in the sequence that give you rhythms and so on. 00:08:33.599 --> 00:08:35.889 And then we want to identify some kind of musical grammar 00:08:35.889 --> 00:08:38.799 that we can use to again control the sequencer. 00:08:38.799 --> 00:08:42.529 So we have stucked structures. That simulate the world. 00:08:42.529 --> 00:08:44.319 And once you've learned this model of music, 00:08:44.319 --> 00:08:47.309 once you've learned the musical grammar, the sequencer and the sounds. 00:08:47.309 --> 00:08:51.779 You can get to the structure of the individual piece of music. 00:08:51.779 --> 00:08:54.399 So, if you want to model the world of music. 00:08:54.399 --> 00:08:58.279 You need to have the lowest level of percepts then we have the higher level of mental simulations. 00:08:58.279 --> 00:09:01.910 And... which give the sequences of the music and the grammars of music. 00:09:01.910 --> 00:09:05.149 And beyond this you have the conceptual landscape that you can use 00:09:05.149 --> 00:09:08.249 to describe different styles of music. 00:09:08.249 --> 00:09:12.130 And if you go up in the hierarchy, you get to more and more abstract models. 00:09:12.130 --> 00:09:13.860 More and more conceptual models. 00:09:13.860 --> 00:09:16.449 And more and more analytic models. 00:09:16.449 --> 00:09:18.160 And this are causal models at some point. 00:09:18.160 --> 00:09:20.999 This causal models can be weakly deterministic, 00:09:20.999 --> 00:09:22.980 basically associative models, which tell you 00:09:22.980 --> 00:09:27.339 if this state happens, it's quite probable that this one comes afterwords. 00:09:27.339 --> 00:09:29.389 Or you can get to a strongly determined model. 00:09:29.389 --> 00:09:32.730 Strongly determined model is one which tells you, if you are in this state 00:09:32.730 --> 00:09:33.879 and this condition is met, 00:09:33.879 --> 00:09:35.589 You are are going to go exactly in this state. 00:09:35.589 --> 00:09:40.110 If this condition is not met, or a different condition is met, you are going to this state. 00:09:40.110 --> 00:09:41.449 And this is what we call an alghorithm. 00:09:41.449 --> 00:09:46.769 it's.. now we are on the domain of computation. 00:09:46.769 --> 00:09:48.730 Computation is slightly different from mathematics. 00:09:48.730 --> 00:09:51.179 It's important to understand this. 00:09:51.179 --> 00:09:54.699 For a long time people have thought that the universe is written in mathematics. 00:09:54.699 --> 00:09:58.399 Or that.. minds are mathematical, or anything is mathematical. 00:09:58.399 --> 00:10:00.439 In fact nothing is mathematical. 00:10:00.439 --> 00:10:04.529 Mathematics is just the domain of formal languages. It doesn't exist. 00:10:04.529 --> 00:10:07.300 Mathematics starts with a void. 00:10:07.300 --> 00:10:11.939 You throw in a few axioms, and if you've chosen a nice axioms, then you get infinite complexity. 00:10:11.939 --> 00:10:13.679 Most of which is not computable. 00:10:13.679 --> 00:10:16.270 In mathematics you can express arbitrary statements, 00:10:16.270 --> 00:10:18.269 because it's all about formal languages. 00:10:18.269 --> 00:10:20.369 Many of this statements will not make sense. 00:10:20.369 --> 00:10:22.469 Many of these statements will make sense in some way, 00:10:22.469 --> 00:10:24.429 but you can not test whether they make sense, 00:10:24.429 --> 00:10:26.740 because they're not computable. 00:10:26.740 --> 00:10:29.929 Computation is different. Computation can exist. 00:10:29.929 --> 00:10:32.459 It's starts with an initial state. 00:10:32.459 --> 00:10:34.739 And then you have a transition function. You do the work. 00:10:34.739 --> 00:10:38.449 You apply the transition function, and you get into the next state. 00:10:38.449 --> 00:10:41.249 Computation is always finite. 00:10:41.249 --> 00:10:43.689 Mathematics is the kingdom of specification. 00:10:43.689 --> 00:10:47.290 And computation is the kingdom of implementation. 00:10:47.290 --> 00:10:50.629 It's very important to understand this difference. 00:10:50.629 --> 00:10:55.329 All our access to mathematics of course is because we do computation. 00:10:55.329 --> 00:10:57.459 We can understand mathematics, 00:10:57.459 --> 00:10:59.939 because our brain can compute some parts of mathematics. 00:10:59.939 --> 00:11:04.439 Very, very little of it, and to very constrained complexity. 00:11:04.439 --> 00:11:06.860 But enough, so we can map some of the infinite complexity 00:11:06.860 --> 00:11:10.410 and noncomputability of mathematics into computational patterns, 00:11:10.410 --> 00:11:12.279 that we can explore. 00:11:12.279 --> 00:11:14.410 So computation is about doing the work, 00:11:14.410 --> 00:11:16.939 it's about executing the transition function. 00:11:19.730 --> 00:11:22.899 Now we've seen that mental representation is about concepts, 00:11:22.899 --> 00:11:25.670 mental simulations, conceptual representations 00:11:25.670 --> 00:11:29.110 and this conceptual representations give us concept spaces. 00:11:29.110 --> 00:11:30.970 And the nice thing about this concept spaces is 00:11:30.970 --> 00:11:33.399 that they give us an interface to our mental representations, 00:11:33.399 --> 00:11:36.290 We can use to address and manipulate them. 00:11:36.290 --> 00:11:39.119 And we can share them in cultures. 00:11:39.119 --> 00:11:40.899 And this concepts are compositional. 00:11:40.899 --> 00:11:43.639 We can put them together, to create new concepts. 00:11:43.639 --> 00:11:48.230 And they can be described using higher dimensional vector spaces. 00:11:48.230 --> 00:11:50.319 They don't do simulation and prediction and so on, 00:11:50.319 --> 00:11:53.119 but we can capture regularity in our concept wisdom. 00:11:53.119 --> 00:11:55.220 With this vector space you can do amazing things. 00:11:55.220 --> 00:11:57.589 For instance, if you take the vector from "King" to "Queen" 00:11:57.589 --> 00:12:01.009 is pretty much the same vector as to.. between "Man" and "Woman" 00:12:01.009 --> 00:12:04.110 And because of this properties, because it's really a high dimentional manifold 00:12:04.110 --> 00:12:07.569 this concepts faces, we can do interesting things, like machine translation 00:12:07.569 --> 00:12:09.470 without understanding what it means. 00:12:09.470 --> 00:12:13.929 That is without doing any proper mental representation, that predicts the world. 00:12:13.929 --> 00:12:16.989 So this is a type of meta representation, that is somewhat incomplete, 00:12:16.989 --> 00:12:21.199 but it captures the landscape that we share in a culture. 00:12:21.199 --> 00:12:25.089 And then there is another type of meta representation, that is linguistic protocols. 00:12:25.089 --> 00:12:27.699 Which is basically a formal grammar and vocabulary. 00:12:27.699 --> 00:12:29.619 And we need this linguistic protocols 00:12:29.619 --> 00:12:32.869 to transfer mental representations between people. 00:12:32.869 --> 00:12:36.019 And we do this by basically scanning our mental representation, 00:12:36.019 --> 00:12:38.660 disassembling them in some way or disambiguating them. 00:12:38.660 --> 00:12:43.040 And then we use it as discrete string of symbols to get it to somebody else, 00:12:43.040 --> 00:12:46.429 and he trains an assembler, that reverses this process, 00:12:46.429 --> 00:12:51.389 and build something that is pretty similar to what we intended to convey. 00:12:51.389 --> 00:12:53.569 And if you look at the progression of AI models, 00:12:53.569 --> 00:12:55.600 it pretty much went the opposite direction. 00:12:55.600 --> 00:13:00.279 So AI started with linguistic protocols, which were expressed in formal grammars. 00:13:00.279 --> 00:13:05.209 And then it got to concepts spaces, and now it's about to address percepts. 00:13:05.209 --> 00:13:09.689 And at some point in near future it's going to get better at mental simulations. 00:13:09.689 --> 00:13:11.730 And at some point after that we get to 00:13:11.730 --> 00:13:14.769 attention directed and motivationally connected systems, 00:13:14.769 --> 00:13:16.600 that make sense of the world. 00:13:16.600 --> 00:13:20.290 that are in some sense able to address meaning. 00:13:20.290 --> 00:13:23.489 This is the hardware that we have can do. 00:13:23.489 --> 00:13:25.629 What kind of hardware do we have? 00:13:25.629 --> 00:13:28.480 That's a very interesting question. 00:13:28.480 --> 00:13:32.230 It could start out with a question: How difficult is it to define a brain? 00:13:32.230 --> 00:13:35.439 We know that the brain must be somewhere hidden in the genome. 00:13:35.439 --> 00:13:38.290 The genome fits on a CD ROM. It's not that complicated. 00:13:38.290 --> 00:13:40.399 It's easier than Microsoft Windows. laughter 00:13:40.399 --> 00:13:45.549 And we also know, that about 2% of the genome is coding for proteins. 00:13:45.549 --> 00:13:48.429 And maybe about 10% of the genome has some kind of stuff 00:13:48.429 --> 00:13:51.239 that tells you when to switch protein. 00:13:51.239 --> 00:13:52.829 And the remainder is mostly garbage. 00:13:52.829 --> 00:13:57.170 It's old viruses that are left over and has never been properly deleted and so on. 00:13:57.170 --> 00:14:01.420 Because there are no real code revisions in the genome. 00:14:01.420 --> 00:14:08.119 So how much of this 10% that is 75 MB code for the brain. 00:14:08.119 --> 00:14:09.469 We don't really know. 00:14:09.469 --> 00:14:13.399 What we do know is we share almost all of this with mice. 00:14:13.399 --> 00:14:15.769 Genetically speaking human is a pretty big mouse. 00:14:15.769 --> 00:14:21.049 With a few bits changed, so.. to fix some of the genetic expressions 00:14:21.049 --> 00:14:25.879 And that is most of the stuff there is going to code for cells and metabolism 00:14:25.879 --> 00:14:27.999 and how your body looks like and so on. 00:14:27.999 --> 00:14:33.679 But if you look at erghmm... how much is expressed in the brain and only in the brain, 00:14:33.679 --> 00:14:35.170 in terms of proteins and so on. 00:14:35.170 --> 00:14:45.639 We find it's about... well of the 2% it's about 5%. That is only the 5% of the 2% that 00:14:45.639 --> 00:14:46.799 is only in the brain. 00:14:46.799 --> 00:14:50.199 And another 5% of the 2% is predominantly in the brain. 00:14:50.199 --> 00:14:52.069 That is more in the brain than anywhere else. 00:14:52.069 --> 00:14:54.249 Which gives you some kind of thing like a lower bound. 00:14:54.249 --> 00:14:59.379 Which means to encode a brain genetically base on the hardware that we are using. 00:14:59.379 --> 00:15:03.539 We need something like at least 500 kB of code. 00:15:03.539 --> 00:15:06.670 Actually ehmm.. this... we very conservative lower bound. 00:15:06.670 --> 00:15:08.720 It's going to be a little more I guess. 00:15:08.720 --> 00:15:11.449 But it sounds surprisingly little, right? 00:15:11.449 --> 00:15:13.709 But in terms of scientific theories this is a lot. 00:15:13.709 --> 00:15:16.519 I mean the universe, according to the core theory 00:15:16.519 --> 00:15:19.420 of the quantum mechanics and so on is like so much of code. 00:15:19.420 --> 00:15:20.569 It's like half a page of code. 00:15:20.569 --> 00:15:23.100 That's it. That's all you need to generate the universe. 00:15:23.100 --> 00:15:25.489 And if you want to understand evolution it's like a paragraph. 00:15:25.489 --> 00:15:29.609 It's couple lines you need to understand evolutionary process. 00:15:29.609 --> 00:15:32.199 And there is a lots, lots of details, that's you get afterwards. 00:15:32.199 --> 00:15:34.220 Because this process itself doesn't define 00:15:34.220 --> 00:15:37.259 how the animals are going to look like, and in similar way is.. 00:15:37.259 --> 00:15:41.269 the code of the universe doesn't tell you what this planet is going to look like. 00:15:41.269 --> 00:15:43.279 And what you guys are going to look like. 00:15:43.279 --> 00:15:45.949 It's just defining the rulebook. 00:15:45.949 --> 00:15:49.209 And in the same sense genome defines the rulebook, 00:15:49.209 --> 00:15:51.569 by which our brain is build. 00:15:51.569 --> 00:15:56.399 erghmmm,.. The brain boots itself into developer process, 00:15:56.399 --> 00:15:58.119 and this booting takes some time. 00:15:58.119 --> 00:16:01.069 So subliminal learning in which initial connections are forged 00:16:01.069 --> 00:16:04.910 And basic models are build of the world, so we can operate in it. 00:16:04.910 --> 00:16:06.999 And how long does this booting take? 00:16:06.999 --> 00:16:09.669 I thing it's about 80 mega seconds. 00:16:09.669 --> 00:16:14.319 That's the time that a child is awake until it's 2.5 years old. 00:16:14.319 --> 00:16:16.449 By this age you understand Star Wars. 00:16:16.449 --> 00:16:20.029 And I think that everything after understanding Star Wars is cosmetics. 00:16:20.029 --> 00:16:26.799 laughterapplause 00:16:26.799 --> 00:16:32.820 You are going to be online, if you get to arrive old age for about 1.5 giga seconds. 00:16:32.820 --> 00:16:37.929 And in this time I think you are going to get not to watch more than 5 milion concepts. 00:16:37.929 --> 00:16:41.600 Why? I don't know real... If you look at this child. 00:16:41.600 --> 00:16:45.480 If a child would be able to form a concept let say every 5 minutes, 00:16:45.480 --> 00:16:48.529 then by the time it's about 4 years old, it's going to have 00:16:48.529 --> 00:16:51.549 something like 250 thousands concepts. 00:16:51.549 --> 00:16:54.119 And... so... a quarter million. 00:16:54.119 --> 00:16:56.809 And if we extrapolate this into our lifetime, 00:16:56.809 --> 00:16:59.799 at some point it slows down, because we have enough concepts, 00:16:59.799 --> 00:17:01.230 to describe the world. 00:17:01.230 --> 00:17:04.410 Maybe it's something... It's I think it's less that 5 million. 00:17:04.410 --> 00:17:07.140 How much storage capacity does the brain has? 00:17:07.140 --> 00:17:12.319 I think that the... the estimates are pretty divergent, 00:17:12.319 --> 00:17:14.930 The lower bound is something like a 100 GB, 00:17:14.930 --> 00:17:18.569 And the upper bound is something like 2.5 PB. 00:17:18.569 --> 00:17:21.890 There is even... even some higher outliers this.. 00:17:21.890 --> 00:17:25.630 If you for instance think that we need all those synaptic vesicle to store information, 00:17:25.630 --> 00:17:27.530 maybe even more fits into this. 00:17:27.530 --> 00:17:31.740 But the 2.5 PB is usually based on what you need 00:17:31.740 --> 00:17:34.760 to code the information that is in all the neurons. 00:17:34.760 --> 00:17:36.770 But maybe the neurons do not really matter so much, 00:17:36.770 --> 00:17:39.930 because if the neuron dies it's not like the word is changing dramatically. 00:17:39.930 --> 00:17:44.270 The brain is very resilient against individual neurons failing. 00:17:44.270 --> 00:17:48.930 So the 100 GB capacity is much more what you actually store in the neurons. 00:17:48.930 --> 00:17:51.380 If you look at all the redundancy that you need. 00:17:51.380 --> 00:17:54.230 And I think this is much closer to the actual Ballpark figure. 00:17:54.230 --> 00:17:58.130 Also if you want to store 5 hundred... 5 million concepts, 00:17:58.130 --> 00:18:02.330 and maybe 10 times or 100 times the number of percepts, on top of this, 00:18:02.330 --> 00:18:05.490 this is roughly the Ballpark figure that you are going to need. 00:18:05.490 --> 00:18:07.110 So our brain 00:18:07.110 --> 00:18:08.320 is a prediction machine. 00:18:08.320 --> 00:18:11.490 It... What it does is it reduces the entropy of the environment, 00:18:11.490 --> 00:18:14.610 to solve whatever problems you are encountering, 00:18:14.610 --> 00:18:17.790 if you don't have a... feedback loop, to fix them. 00:18:17.790 --> 00:18:20.240 So normally if something happens, we have some kind of feedback loop, 00:18:20.240 --> 00:18:23.440 that regulates our temperature or that makes problems go away. 00:18:23.440 --> 00:18:26.050 And only when this is not working we employ recognition. 00:18:26.050 --> 00:18:29.250 And then we start this arbitrary computational processes, 00:18:29.250 --> 00:18:31.830 that is facilitated by the neural cortex. 00:18:31.830 --> 00:18:34.940 And this.. arhmm.. neural cortex has really do arbitrary programs. 00:18:34.940 --> 00:18:37.870 But it can do so with only with very limited complexity, 00:18:37.870 --> 00:18:42.070 because really you just saw, it's not that complex. 00:18:42.070 --> 00:18:43.900 The modeling of the world is very slow. 00:18:43.900 --> 00:18:46.570 And it's something that we see in our eye models. 00:18:46.570 --> 00:18:48.150 To learn the basic structure of the world 00:18:48.150 --> 00:18:49.330 takes a very long time. 00:18:49.330 --> 00:18:52.650 To learn basically that we are moving in 3D and objects are moving, 00:18:52.650 --> 00:18:54.030 and what they look like. 00:18:54.030 --> 00:18:55.130 Once we have this basic model, 00:18:55.130 --> 00:18:59.300 we can get to very, very quick understanding within this model. 00:18:59.300 --> 00:19:02.110 Basically encoding based on the structure of the world, 00:19:02.110 --> 00:19:03.610 that we've learned. 00:19:03.610 --> 00:19:07.100 And this is some kind of data compression, that we are doing. 00:19:07.100 --> 00:19:09.740 We use this model, this grammar of the world, 00:19:09.740 --> 00:19:12.150 this simulation structures that we've learned, 00:19:12.150 --> 00:19:15.190 to encode the world very, very efficently. 00:19:15.190 --> 00:19:17.740 How much data compression do we get? 00:19:17.740 --> 00:19:19.860 Well... if you look at the retina. 00:19:19.860 --> 00:19:24.610 The retina get's data in the order of about 10Gb/s. 00:19:24.610 --> 00:19:27.500 And the retina already compresses these data, 00:19:27.500 --> 00:19:31.120 and puts them into optic nerve at the rate of about 1Mb/s 00:19:31.120 --> 00:19:34.030 This is what you get fed into visual cortex. 00:19:34.030 --> 00:19:36.370 And the visual cortex does some additional compression, 00:19:36.370 --> 00:19:42.110 and by the time it gets to layer four of the first layer of vision, to V1. 00:19:42.110 --> 00:19:46.880 We are down to something like 1Kb/s. 00:19:46.880 --> 00:19:50.720 So if we extrapolate this, and you get live to the age of 80 years, 00:19:50.720 --> 00:19:54.140 and you are awake for 2/3 of your lifetime. 00:19:54.140 --> 00:19:56.930 That is you have your eyes open for 2/3 of your lifetime. 00:19:56.930 --> 00:19:59.040 The stuff that you get into your brain, 00:19:59.040 --> 00:20:03.700 via your visual perception is going to be only 2TB. 00:20:03.700 --> 00:20:05.370 Only 2TB of visual data. 00:20:05.370 --> 00:20:06.680 Throughout all your lifetime. 00:20:06.680 --> 00:20:09.430 That's all you are going to get ever to see. 00:20:09.430 --> 00:20:11.160 Isn't this depressing? 00:20:11.160 --> 00:20:12.790 laughter 00:20:12.790 --> 00:20:16.540 So I would really like to eghmm.. to tell you, 00:20:16.540 --> 00:20:22.750 choose wisely what you are going to look at. laughter 00:20:22.750 --> 00:20:26.940 Ok. Let's look at this problem of neural compositionality. 00:20:26.940 --> 00:20:29.250 Our brains has this amazing thing that they can put 00:20:29.250 --> 00:20:31.510 meta representation together very, very quickly. 00:20:31.510 --> 00:20:33.150 For instance you read a page of code, 00:20:33.150 --> 00:20:35.190 you compile it in you mind into some kind of program 00:20:35.190 --> 00:20:37.700 it tells you what this page is going to do. 00:20:37.700 --> 00:20:39.110 Isn't that amazing? 00:20:39.110 --> 00:20:40.810 And then you can forget about this, 00:20:40.810 --> 00:20:43.910 disassemble it all, and use the building blocks for something else. 00:20:43.910 --> 00:20:45.230 It's like legos. 00:20:45.230 --> 00:20:48.000 How you can do this with neurons? 00:20:48.000 --> 00:20:50.160 Legos can do this, because they have a well defined interface. 00:20:50.160 --> 00:20:52.180 They have all this slots, you know, that fit together 00:20:52.180 --> 00:20:53.600 in well defined ways. 00:20:53.600 --> 00:20:54.530 How can neurons do this? 00:20:54.530 --> 00:20:57.280 Well, neurons can maybe learn the interface of other neurons. 00:20:57.280 --> 00:20:59.780 But that's difficult, because every neuron looks slightly different, 00:20:59.780 --> 00:21:04.830 after all this... some kind of biologically grown natural stuff. 00:21:04.830 --> 00:21:06.610 laughter 00:21:06.610 --> 00:21:10.620 So what you want to do is, you want to encapsulate this erhmm... 00:21:10.620 --> 00:21:13.020 diversity of the neurons to make the predictable. 00:21:13.020 --> 00:21:14.820 To give them well defined interface. 00:21:14.820 --> 00:21:16.410 And I think that nature solution to this 00:21:16.410 --> 00:21:19.770 is cortical columns. 00:21:19.770 --> 00:21:24.250 Cortical column is a circuit of between 100 and 400 neurons. 00:21:24.250 --> 00:21:26.860 And this circuit has some kind of neural network, 00:21:26.860 --> 00:21:28.650 that can learn stuff. 00:21:28.650 --> 00:21:31.070 And after it has learned particular function, 00:21:31.070 --> 00:21:35.320 and in between, it's able to link up these other cortical columns. 00:21:35.320 --> 00:21:37.120 And we have about 100 million of those. 00:21:37.120 --> 00:21:39.770 Depending on how many neurons you assume is in there, 00:21:39.770 --> 00:21:41.490 it's... erghmm we guess it's something, 00:21:41.490 --> 00:21:46.500 at least 20 million and maybe something like a 100 million. 00:21:46.500 --> 00:21:48.330 And this cortical columns, what they can do, 00:21:48.330 --> 00:21:50.280 is they can link up like lego bricks, 00:21:50.280 --> 00:21:54.130 and then perform, by transmitting information between them, 00:21:54.130 --> 00:21:55.990 pretty much arbitrary computations. 00:21:55.990 --> 00:21:57.540 What kind of computation? 00:21:57.540 --> 00:22:00.130 Well... Solomonoff induction. 00:22:00.130 --> 00:22:03.820 And... they have some short range links, to their neighbors. 00:22:03.820 --> 00:22:05.690 Which comes almost for free, because erghmm.. 00:22:05.690 --> 00:22:08.490 well, they are connected to them, they are direct neighborhood. 00:22:08.490 --> 00:22:10.050 And they have some long range connectivity, 00:22:10.050 --> 00:22:13.000 so you can combine everything in your cortex with everything. 00:22:13.000 --> 00:22:14.900 So you need some kind of global switchboard. 00:22:14.900 --> 00:22:17.630 Some grid like architecture of long range connections. 00:22:17.630 --> 00:22:18.900 They are going to be more expensive, 00:22:18.900 --> 00:22:20.640 they are going to be slower, 00:22:20.640 --> 00:22:23.590 but they are going to be there. 00:22:23.590 --> 00:22:26.070 So how can we optimize what these guys are doing? 00:22:26.070 --> 00:22:28.270 In some sense it's like an economy. 00:22:28.270 --> 00:22:31.460 It's not enduring based system, as we often use in machine learning. 00:22:31.460 --> 00:22:32.780 It's really an economy. You have... 00:22:32.780 --> 00:22:35.560 The question is, you have a fixed number of elements, 00:22:35.560 --> 00:22:37.970 how can you do the most valuable stuff with them. 00:22:37.970 --> 00:22:41.030 Fixed resources, most valuable stuff, the problem is economy. 00:22:41.030 --> 00:22:43.320 So you have an economy of information brokers. 00:22:43.320 --> 00:22:45.830 Every one of these guys, this little cortical columns, 00:22:45.830 --> 00:22:48.150 is very simplistic information broker. 00:22:48.150 --> 00:22:50.950 And they trade rewards against neg entropy, 00:22:50.950 --> 00:22:54.140 Against reducing entropy in the... in the world. 00:22:54.140 --> 00:22:55.790 And to do this, as we just saw 00:22:55.790 --> 00:22:58.890 that they need some kind of standardized interface. 00:22:58.890 --> 00:23:02.090 And internally, to use this interface they are going to 00:23:02.090 --> 00:23:03.880 have some kind of state machine. 00:23:03.880 --> 00:23:05.660 And then they are going to pass messages 00:23:05.660 --> 00:23:07.400 between each other. 00:23:07.400 --> 00:23:08.630 And what are these messages? 00:23:08.630 --> 00:23:11.100 Well, it's going to be hard to discover these messages, 00:23:11.100 --> 00:23:12.800 by looking at brains. 00:23:12.800 --> 00:23:14.800 Because it's very difficult to see in brains, 00:23:14.800 --> 00:23:15.450 what the are actually doing. 00:23:15.450 --> 00:23:17.250 you just see all these neurons. 00:23:17.250 --> 00:23:18.790 And if you would be waiting for neuroscience, 00:23:18.790 --> 00:23:20.970 to discover anything, we wouldn't even have 00:23:20.970 --> 00:23:22.590 gradient descent or anything else. 00:23:22.590 --> 00:23:23.720 We wouldn't have neuron learning. 00:23:23.720 --> 00:23:25.420 We wouldn't have all this advances in AI. 00:23:25.420 --> 00:23:28.230 Jürgen Schmidhuber said that the biggest, 00:23:28.230 --> 00:23:30.010 the last contribution of neuroscience to 00:23:30.010 --> 00:23:32.220 artificial intelligence was about 50 years ago. 00:23:32.220 --> 00:23:34.280 That's depressing, and it might be 00:23:34.280 --> 00:23:37.870 overemphasizing the unimportance of neuroscience, 00:23:37.870 --> 00:23:39.490 because neuroscience is very important, 00:23:39.490 --> 00:23:41.090 once you know what are you looking for. 00:23:41.090 --> 00:23:42.510 You can actually often find this, 00:23:42.510 --> 00:23:44.320 and see whether you are on the right track. 00:23:44.320 --> 00:23:45.860 But it's very difficult to take neuroscience 00:23:45.860 --> 00:23:47.940 to understand how the brain is working. 00:23:47.940 --> 00:23:49.290 Because it's really like understanding 00:23:49.290 --> 00:23:53.230 flight by looking at birds through a microscope. 00:23:53.230 --> 00:23:55.150 So, what are these messages? 00:23:55.150 --> 00:23:57.850 You are going to need messages, that tell these cortical columns 00:23:57.850 --> 00:24:00.160 to join themselves into a structure. 00:24:00.160 --> 00:24:01.990 And to unlink again once they're done. 00:24:01.990 --> 00:24:03.690 You need ways that they can request each other 00:24:03.690 --> 00:24:06.040 to perform computations for them. 00:24:06.040 --> 00:24:07.510 You need ways they can inhibit each other 00:24:07.510 --> 00:24:08.320 when they are linked up. 00:24:08.320 --> 00:24:10.990 So they don't do conflicting computations. 00:24:10.990 --> 00:24:12.940 Then they need to tell you whether the computation, 00:24:12.940 --> 00:24:14.110 the result of the computation 00:24:14.110 --> 00:24:16.730 that the are asked to do is probably false. 00:24:16.730 --> 00:24:19.340 Or whether it's probably true, but you still need to wait for others, 00:24:19.340 --> 00:24:21.990 to tell you whether the details worked out. 00:24:21.990 --> 00:24:24.240 Or whether it's confirmed true that the concepts 00:24:24.240 --> 00:24:26.730 that they stand for is actually the case. 00:24:26.730 --> 00:24:28.150 And then you want to have learning, 00:24:28.150 --> 00:24:29.630 to tell you how well this worked. 00:24:29.630 --> 00:24:31.390 So you will have to announce a bounty, 00:24:31.390 --> 00:24:34.380 that tells them to link up and kind of reward signal 00:24:34.380 --> 00:24:36.740 that makes do computation in the first place. 00:24:36.740 --> 00:24:38.680 And then you want to have some kind of reward signal 00:24:38.680 --> 00:24:40.550 once you got the result as an organism. 00:24:40.550 --> 00:24:42.280 But you reach your goal if you made 00:24:42.280 --> 00:24:45.810 the disturbance go away or what ever you consume the cake. 00:24:45.810 --> 00:24:47.710 And then you will have some kind of reward signal 00:24:47.710 --> 00:24:49.250 that's you give everybody. 00:24:49.250 --> 00:24:50.650 That was involved in this. 00:24:50.650 --> 00:24:52.720 And this reward signal facilitates learning, 00:24:52.720 --> 00:24:55.230 so the.. difference between the announce reward 00:24:55.230 --> 00:24:57.530 and consumption reward is the learning signal 00:24:57.530 --> 00:24:58.740 for these guys. 00:24:58.740 --> 00:25:00.210 So they can learn how to play together, 00:25:00.210 --> 00:25:02.700 and how to do the Solomonoff induction. 00:25:02.700 --> 00:25:04.660 Now, I've told you that Solomonoff induction 00:25:04.660 --> 00:25:05.280 is not computable. 00:25:05.280 --> 00:25:07.630 And it's mostly because of two things, 00:25:07.630 --> 00:25:09.280 First of all it's needs infinite resources 00:25:09.280 --> 00:25:11.200 to compare all the possible models. 00:25:11.200 --> 00:25:13.530 And the other one is that we do not know 00:25:13.530 --> 00:25:15.440 the priori probability for our Bayesian model. 00:25:15.440 --> 00:25:19.280 If we do not know how likely unknown stuff is in the world. 00:25:19.280 --> 00:25:22.520 So what we do instead is, we set some kind of hyperparameter, 00:25:22.520 --> 00:25:25.050 Some kind of default priori probability for concepts, 00:25:25.050 --> 00:25:28.110 that are encoded by cortical columns. 00:25:28.110 --> 00:25:30.580 And if we set these parameters very low, 00:25:30.580 --> 00:25:32.140 then we are going to end up with inferences 00:25:32.140 --> 00:25:35.250 that are quite probable. 00:25:35.250 --> 00:25:36.480 For unknown things. 00:25:36.480 --> 00:25:37.690 And then we can test for those. 00:25:37.690 --> 00:25:41.350 If we set this parameter higher, we are going to be very, very creative. 00:25:41.350 --> 00:25:43.670 But we end up with many many theories, 00:25:43.670 --> 00:25:45.140 that are difficult to test. 00:25:45.140 --> 00:25:48.470 Because maybe there are too many theories to test. 00:25:48.470 --> 00:25:50.650 Basically every of these cortical columns will now tell you, 00:25:50.650 --> 00:25:52.240 when you ask them if they are true: 00:25:52.240 --> 00:25:54.960 "Yes I'm probably true, but i still need to ask others, 00:25:54.960 --> 00:25:56.980 to work on the details" 00:25:56.980 --> 00:25:58.670 So these others are going to be get active, 00:25:58.670 --> 00:26:00.640 and they are being asked by the asking element: 00:26:00.640 --> 00:26:01.730 "Are you going to be true?", 00:26:01.730 --> 00:26:04.380 and they say "Yeah, probably yes, I just have to work on the details" 00:26:04.380 --> 00:26:05.930 and they are going to ask even more. 00:26:05.930 --> 00:26:07.980 So your brain is going to light up like a christmas tree, 00:26:07.980 --> 00:26:10.240 and do all these amazing computations, 00:26:10.240 --> 00:26:12.450 and you see connections everywhere, most of them are wrong. 00:26:12.450 --> 00:26:16.310 You are basically in psychotic state if your hyperparameter is too high. 00:26:16.310 --> 00:26:20.790 You're brain invents more theories that it can disproof. 00:26:20.790 --> 00:26:24.550 Would it actually sometimes be good to be in this state? 00:26:24.550 --> 00:26:27.850 You bet. So i think every night our brain goes in this state. 00:26:27.850 --> 00:26:31.720 We turn up this hyperparameter. We dream. We get all kinds 00:26:31.720 --> 00:26:34.100 weird connections, and we get to see connections, 00:26:34.100 --> 00:26:36.140 that otherwise we couldn't be seeing. 00:26:36.140 --> 00:26:38.080 Even though... because they are highly improbable. 00:26:38.080 --> 00:26:42.750 But sometimes they hold, and we see... "Oh my God, DNA is organized in double helix". 00:26:42.750 --> 00:26:44.640 And this is what we remember in the morning. 00:26:44.640 --> 00:26:46.870 All the other stuff is deleted. 00:26:46.870 --> 00:26:48.440 So we usually don't form long term memories 00:26:48.440 --> 00:26:51.480 in dreams, if everything goes well. 00:26:51.480 --> 00:26:56.670 If you accidentally trip this up.. your modulators, 00:26:56.670 --> 00:26:59.100 for instance by consuming illegal substances, 00:26:59.100 --> 00:27:01.690 or because you just gone randomly psychotic 00:27:01.690 --> 00:27:04.600 you was basically entering a dreaming state I guess. 00:27:04.600 --> 00:27:06.990 You get to a state when the brain starts inventing more 00:27:06.990 --> 00:27:10.860 concepts that it can disproof. 00:27:10.860 --> 00:27:13.600 So you want to have a state where this is well balanced. 00:27:13.600 --> 00:27:16.180 And the difference between highly creative people, 00:27:16.180 --> 00:27:20.070 and very religious people is probably a different setting of this hyperparameter. 00:27:20.070 --> 00:27:21.890 So I suspect that people that people that are genius, 00:27:21.890 --> 00:27:23.880 like people like Einstein and so on, 00:27:23.880 --> 00:27:26.600 do not simply have better neurons than others. 00:27:26.600 --> 00:27:29.130 What they mostly have is a slightly hyperparameter, 00:27:29.130 --> 00:27:33.860 that is very finely tuned, so they can get better balance than other people 00:27:33.860 --> 00:27:43.850 in finding theories that might be true, but can still be disprooven. 00:27:43.850 --> 00:27:49.480 So inventiveness could be a hyperparameter in the brain. 00:27:49.480 --> 00:27:54.169 If you want to measure the quality of belief that we have 00:27:54.169 --> 00:27:56.370 we are going to have to have some kind of some cost function 00:27:56.370 --> 00:27:58.710 which is based on motivational system. 00:27:58.710 --> 00:28:02.400 And to identify if belief is good or not we can abstract criteria, 00:28:02.400 --> 00:28:06.440 for instance how well does it predict the wourld, or how about does it reduce uncertainty 00:28:06.440 --> 00:28:07.590 in the world, 00:28:07.590 --> 00:28:10.020 or is it consistency and sparse. 00:28:10.020 --> 00:28:14.080 And then of course utility, how about does it help me to satisfy my needs. 00:28:14.080 --> 00:28:18.920 And the motivational system is going to evaluate all this things by giving a signal. 00:28:18.920 --> 00:28:24.200 And the first signal.. kind of signal is the possible rewards if we are able to compute 00:28:24.200 --> 00:28:25.020 the task. 00:28:25.020 --> 00:28:27.430 And this is probably done by dopamine. 00:28:27.430 --> 00:28:30.350 So we have a very small area in the brain, substantia nigra, 00:28:30.350 --> 00:28:33.610 and the ventral tegmental area, and they produce dopamine. 00:28:33.610 --> 00:28:38.180 And this get fed into lateral frontal cortext and the frontal lobe, 00:28:38.180 --> 00:28:41.920 which control attention, and tell you what things to do. 00:28:41.920 --> 00:28:46.020 And if we have successfully done what you wanted to do, 00:28:46.020 --> 00:28:49.300 we consume the rewards. 00:28:49.300 --> 00:28:51.940 And we do this with another signal which is serotonine. 00:28:51.940 --> 00:28:53.480 It's also announce to motivational system, 00:28:53.480 --> 00:28:55.870 to this very small are the Raphe nuclei. 00:28:55.870 --> 00:28:58.690 And it feeds into all the areas of the brain where learning is necessary. 00:28:58.690 --> 00:29:02.160 A connection is strengthen once you get to result. 00:29:02.160 --> 00:29:07.559 These two substances are emitted by the motivational system. 00:29:07.559 --> 00:29:09.710 The motivational system is a bunch of needs, 00:29:09.710 --> 00:29:11.510 essentially you regulate it below the cortext. 00:29:11.510 --> 00:29:14.490 They are not part of your mental representations. 00:29:14.490 --> 00:29:16.930 They are part of something that is more primary than this. 00:29:16.930 --> 00:29:19.360 This is what makes us go, this is what makes us human. 00:29:19.360 --> 00:29:22.290 This is not our rationality, this is what we want. 00:29:22.290 --> 00:29:27.000 And the needs are physiological, they are social, they are cognitive. 00:29:27.000 --> 00:29:28.960 And you pretty much born with them. 00:29:28.960 --> 00:29:30.470 They can not be totally adaptive, 00:29:30.470 --> 00:29:33.340 because if we were adaptive, we wouldn't be doing anything. 00:29:33.340 --> 00:29:35.390 The needs are resistive. 00:29:35.390 --> 00:29:38.290 They are pushing us against the world. 00:29:38.290 --> 00:29:40.170 If you wouldn't have all this needs, 00:29:40.170 --> 00:29:41.740 If you wouldn't have this motivational system, 00:29:41.740 --> 00:29:43.630 you would just be doing what best for you. 00:29:43.630 --> 00:29:45.150 Which means collapse on the ground, 00:29:45.150 --> 00:29:49.010 be a vegetable, rod, give into gravity. 00:29:49.010 --> 00:29:50.270 Instead you do all this unpleasant things, 00:29:50.270 --> 00:29:52.690 to get up in the morning, you eat, you have sex, 00:29:52.690 --> 00:29:54.120 you do all this crazy things. 00:29:54.120 --> 00:29:58.809 And it's only because the motivational system forces you to. 00:29:58.809 --> 00:30:00.850 The motivational system takes this bunch of matter, 00:30:00.850 --> 00:30:02.890 and makes us to do all these strange things, 00:30:02.890 --> 00:30:05.940 just so genomes get replicated and so on. 00:30:05.940 --> 00:30:10.470 And... so to do this, we are going to build resistance against the world. 00:30:10.470 --> 00:30:13.360 And the motivational system is in a sense forcing us, 00:30:13.360 --> 00:30:15.470 to do all this things by giving us needs, 00:30:15.470 --> 00:30:18.330 and the need have some kind of target value and current value. 00:30:18.330 --> 00:30:21.850 If we have a differential between the target value and current value, 00:30:21.850 --> 00:30:24.590 we perceive some urgency to do something about the need. 00:30:24.590 --> 00:30:26.680 And when the target value approaches the current value 00:30:26.680 --> 00:30:28.660 we get the pleasure, which is a learning signal. 00:30:28.660 --> 00:30:30.540 If it gets away from it we get a displeasure signal, 00:30:30.540 --> 00:30:31.870 which is also a learning signal. 00:30:31.870 --> 00:30:35.370 And we can use this to structure our understanding of the world. 00:30:35.370 --> 00:30:36.870 To understand what goals are and so on. 00:30:36.870 --> 00:30:40.020 Goals are learned. Needs are not. 00:30:40.020 --> 00:30:42.780 To learn we need success and failure in the world. 00:30:42.780 --> 00:30:45.940 But to do things we need anticipated reward. 00:30:45.940 --> 00:30:48.120 So it's dopamine that's makes brain go round. 00:30:48.120 --> 00:30:50.560 Dopamine makes you do things. 00:30:50.560 --> 00:30:52.750 But in order to do this in the right way, 00:30:52.750 --> 00:30:54.610 you have to make sure, that the cells can not 00:30:54.610 --> 00:30:55.880 produce dopamine themselves. 00:30:55.880 --> 00:30:59.100 If they do this they can start to drive others to work for them. 00:30:59.100 --> 00:31:01.870 You are going to get something like bureaucracy in your neural cortext, 00:31:01.870 --> 00:31:05.650 where different bosses try to set up others to they own bidding 00:31:05.650 --> 00:31:07.910 and pitch against other groups in nerual cortext. 00:31:07.910 --> 00:31:09.730 It's going to be horrible. 00:31:09.730 --> 00:31:12.210 So you want to have some kind of central authority, 00:31:12.210 --> 00:31:16.290 that make sure that the cells do not produce dopamine themselves. 00:31:16.290 --> 00:31:19.679 It's only been produce in very small area and then given out, 00:31:19.679 --> 00:31:21.059 and pass through the system. 00:31:21.059 --> 00:31:23.350 And after you're done with it's going to be gone, 00:31:23.350 --> 00:31:26.070 so there is no hoarding of the dopamine. 00:31:26.070 --> 00:31:29.770 And in our society the role of dopamine is played by money. 00:31:29.770 --> 00:31:32.150 Money is not reward in itself. 00:31:32.150 --> 00:31:35.570 It's in some sense way that you can trade against the reward. 00:31:35.570 --> 00:31:36.850 You can not eat money. 00:31:36.850 --> 00:31:40.500 You can take it later and take a arbitrary reward for it. 00:31:40.500 --> 00:31:45.400 And in some sense money is the dopamine that makes organizations 00:31:45.400 --> 00:31:48.410 and society, companies and many individuals do things. 00:31:48.410 --> 00:31:50.500 They do stuff because of money. 00:31:50.500 --> 00:31:53.309 But money if you compare to dopamine is pretty broken, 00:31:53.309 --> 00:31:54.850 because you can hoard it. 00:31:54.850 --> 00:31:57.400 So you are going to have this cortical columns in the real world, 00:31:57.400 --> 00:31:59.670 which are individual people or individual corporations. 00:31:59.670 --> 00:32:03.250 They are hoarding the dopamine, they sit on this very big pile of dopamine. 00:32:03.250 --> 00:32:07.890 They are starving the rest of the society of the dopamine. 00:32:07.890 --> 00:32:10.630 They don't give it away, and they can make it do it's bidding. 00:32:10.630 --> 00:32:13.970 So for instance they can pitch substantial part of society 00:32:13.970 --> 00:32:16.130 against understanding of global warming. 00:32:16.130 --> 00:32:20.110 because they profit of global warming or of technology that leads to global warming, 00:32:20.110 --> 00:32:22.850 which is very bad for all of us. applause 00:32:22.850 --> 00:32:28.850 So our society is a nervous system that lies to itself. 00:32:28.850 --> 00:32:30.429 How can we overcome this? 00:32:30.429 --> 00:32:32.480 Actually, we don't know. 00:32:32.480 --> 00:32:34.639 To do this we would need to have some kind of centrialized, 00:32:34.639 --> 00:32:36.660 top-down reward motivational system. 00:32:36.660 --> 00:32:39.010 We have this for instance in the military, 00:32:39.010 --> 00:32:42.520 you have this system of military rewards that you get. 00:32:42.520 --> 00:32:44.950 And this are completely controlled from the top. 00:32:44.950 --> 00:32:47.260 Also within working organizations you have this. 00:32:47.260 --> 00:32:49.600 In corporations you have centralized rewards, 00:32:49.600 --> 00:32:51.850 it's not like rewards flow bottom-up, 00:32:51.850 --> 00:32:55.120 they always flown top-down. 00:32:55.120 --> 00:32:57.850 And there was an attempt to model society in such a way. 00:32:57.850 --> 00:33:03.380 That was in Chile in the early 1970, the Allende government had the idea 00:33:03.380 --> 00:33:07.320 to redesign society or economy in society using cybernetics. 00:33:07.320 --> 00:33:12.590 So Allende invited a bunch of cyberneticians to redesign the Chilean economy. 00:33:12.590 --> 00:33:14.550 And this was meant to be the control room, 00:33:14.550 --> 00:33:17.460 where Allende and his chief economists would be sitting, 00:33:17.460 --> 00:33:19.709 to look at what the economy is doing. 00:33:19.709 --> 00:33:23.880 We don't know how this would work out, because we know how it ended. 00:33:23.880 --> 00:33:27.260 In 1973 there was this big putsch in Chile, 00:33:27.260 --> 00:33:30.290 and this experiment ended among other things. 00:33:30.290 --> 00:33:34.170 Maybe it would have worked, who knows? Nobody tried it. 00:33:34.170 --> 00:33:38.370 So, there is something else what is going on in people, 00:33:38.370 --> 00:33:40.030 beyond the motivational system. 00:33:40.030 --> 00:33:43.610 That is: we have social criteria, for learning. 00:33:43.610 --> 00:33:47.670 We also check if our ideas are normativly acceptable. 00:33:47.670 --> 00:33:50.510 And this is actually a good thing, because individual may shortcut 00:33:50.510 --> 00:33:52.590 the learning through communication. 00:33:52.590 --> 00:33:55.260 Other people have learned stuff that we don't need to learn ourselves. 00:33:55.260 --> 00:33:59.800 We can build on this, so we can accelerate learning by many order of magnitutde, 00:33:59.800 --> 00:34:00.970 which makes culture possible. 00:34:00.970 --> 00:34:04.190 And which makes many anything possible, because if you were on your own 00:34:04.190 --> 00:34:06.860 you would not be going to find out very much in your lifetime. 00:34:08.520 --> 00:34:11.270 You know how they say? Everything that you do, 00:34:11.270 --> 00:34:14.250 you do by standing on the shoulders of giants. 00:34:14.250 --> 00:34:17.779 Or on a big pile of dwarfs it works either way. 00:34:17.779 --> 00:34:27.089 laughterapplause 00:34:27.089 --> 00:34:30.379 Social learning usually outperforms individual learning. You can test this. 00:34:30.379 --> 00:34:33.949 But in the case of conflict between different social truths, 00:34:33.949 --> 00:34:36.659 you need some way to decide who to believe. 00:34:36.659 --> 00:34:39.498 So you have some kind of reputation estimate for different authority, 00:34:39.498 --> 00:34:42.399 and you use this to check whom you believe. 00:34:42.399 --> 00:34:45.748 And the problem of course is this in existing society, in real society, 00:34:45.748 --> 00:34:48.389 this reputation system is going to reflect power structure, 00:34:48.389 --> 00:34:51.699 which may distort your belief systematically. 00:34:51.699 --> 00:34:54.759 Social learning therefore leads groups to synchronize their opinions. 00:34:54.759 --> 00:34:57.220 And the opinions become ...get another role. 00:34:57.220 --> 00:35:02.180 They become important part of signalling which group you belong to. 00:35:02.180 --> 00:35:06.630 So opinions start to signal group loyalty in societies. 00:35:06.630 --> 00:35:11.170 And people in this, and that's the actual world, they should optimize not for getting the best possible 00:35:11.170 --> 00:35:12.619 opinions in terms of truth. 00:35:12.619 --> 00:35:17.289 They should guess... they should optimize for doing... having the best possible opinion, 00:35:17.289 --> 00:35:19.799 with respect to agreement with their peers. 00:35:19.799 --> 00:35:22.029 If you have the same opinion as your peers, you can signal them 00:35:22.029 --> 00:35:24.299 that you are the part of their ingroup, they are going to like you. 00:35:24.299 --> 00:35:28.160 If you don't do this, chances are they are not going to like you. 00:35:28.160 --> 00:35:34.049 There is rarely any benefit in life to be in disagreement with your boss. Right? 00:35:34.049 --> 00:35:39.230 So, if you evolve an opinion forming system in these curcumstances, 00:35:39.230 --> 00:35:41.220 you should be ending up with an opinion forming system, 00:35:41.220 --> 00:35:42.980 that leaves you with the most usefull opinion, 00:35:42.980 --> 00:35:45.400 which is the opinion in your environment. 00:35:45.400 --> 00:35:48.400 And it turns out, most people are able to do this effortlessly. 00:35:48.400 --> 00:35:50.969 laughter 00:35:50.969 --> 00:35:55.529 They have an instinct, that makes them adapt the dominant opinion in their social environment. 00:35:55.529 --> 00:35:56.599 It's amazing, right? 00:35:56.599 --> 00:36:01.040 And if you are nerd like me, you don't get this. 00:36:01.040 --> 00:36:08.999 laugingapplause 00:36:08.999 --> 00:36:12.999 So in the world out there, explanations piggyback on you group allegiance. 00:36:12.999 --> 00:36:15.900 For instance you will find that there is a substantial group of people that believes 00:36:15.900 --> 00:36:18.380 the minimum wage is good for the economy and for you 00:36:18.380 --> 00:36:20.549 and another one believes that its bad. 00:36:20.549 --> 00:36:23.470 And its pretty much aligned with political parties. 00:36:23.470 --> 00:36:25.970 Its not aligned with different understandings of economy, 00:36:25.970 --> 00:36:30.740 because nobody understands how the economy works. 00:36:30.740 --> 00:36:36.330 And if you are a nerd you try to understand the world in terms of what is true and false. 00:36:36.330 --> 00:36:40.680 You try to prove everything by putting it in some kind of true and false level 00:36:40.680 --> 00:36:43.589 and if you are not a nerd you try to get to right and wrong 00:36:43.589 --> 00:36:45.609 you try to understand whether you are in alignment 00:36:45.609 --> 00:36:49.559 with what's objectively right in your society, right? 00:36:49.559 --> 00:36:55.680 So I guess that nerds are people that have a defect in there opinion forming system. 00:36:55.680 --> 00:36:57.069 laughing 00:36:57.069 --> 00:37:00.609 And usually that's maladaptive and under normal circumstances 00:37:00.609 --> 00:37:03.099 nerds would mostly be filtered from the world, 00:37:03.099 --> 00:37:06.529 because they don't reproduce so well, because people don't like them so much. 00:37:06.529 --> 00:37:07.960 laughing 00:37:07.960 --> 00:37:11.119 And then something very strange happened. The computer revolution came along and 00:37:11.119 --> 00:37:14.170 suddenly if you argue with the computer it doesn't help you if you have the 00:37:14.170 --> 00:37:17.849 normatively correct opinion you need to be able to understand things in terms of 00:37:17.849 --> 00:37:26.029 true and false, right? applause 00:37:26.029 --> 00:37:29.779 So now we have this strange situation that the weird people that have this offensive, 00:37:29.779 --> 00:37:33.410 strange opinions and that really don't mix well with the real normal people 00:37:33.410 --> 00:37:38.119 get all this high paying jobs and we don't understand how is that happening. 00:37:38.119 --> 00:37:42.599 And it's because suddenly our maladapting is a benefit. 00:37:42.599 --> 00:37:47.300 But out there there is this world of the social norms and it's made of paperwalls. 00:37:47.300 --> 00:37:50.349 There are all this things that are true and false in a society that make 00:37:50.349 --> 00:37:51.549 people behave. 00:37:51.549 --> 00:37:57.390 It's like this japanese wall, there. They made palaces out of paper basically. 00:37:57.390 --> 00:38:00.339 And these are walls by convention. 00:38:00.339 --> 00:38:04.009 They exist because people agree that this is a wall. 00:38:04.009 --> 00:38:06.630 And if you are a hypnotist like Donald Trump 00:38:06.630 --> 00:38:11.109 you can see that these are paper walls and you can shift them. 00:38:11.109 --> 00:38:14.079 And if you are a nerd like me you can not see these paperwalls. 00:38:14.079 --> 00:38:20.230 If you pay closely attention you see that people move and then suddenly middair 00:38:20.230 --> 00:38:22.869 they make a turn. Why would they do this? 00:38:22.869 --> 00:38:24.360 There must be something that they see there 00:38:24.360 --> 00:38:26.549 and this is basically a normative agreement. 00:38:26.549 --> 00:38:29.690 And you can infer what this is and then you can manipulate it and understand it. 00:38:29.690 --> 00:38:32.640 Of course you can't fix this, you can debug yourself in this regard, 00:38:32.640 --> 00:38:34.690 but it's something that is hard to see for nerds. 00:38:34.690 --> 00:38:38.109 So in some sense they have a superpower: they can think straight in the presence 00:38:38.109 --> 00:38:39.079 of others. 00:38:39.079 --> 00:38:42.590 But often they end up in their living room and people are upset. 00:38:42.590 --> 00:38:45.810 laughter 00:38:45.810 --> 00:38:49.789 Learning in a complex domain can not guarantee that you find the global maximum. 00:38:49.789 --> 00:38:53.970 We know that we can not find truth because we can not recognize whether we live 00:38:53.970 --> 00:38:57.059 on a plain field or on a simulated plain field. 00:38:57.059 --> 00:39:00.579 But what we can do is, we can try to approach a global maximum. 00:39:00.579 --> 00:39:02.339 But we don't know if that is the global maximum. 00:39:02.339 --> 00:39:05.509 We will always move along some kind of belief gradient. 00:39:05.509 --> 00:39:09.110 We will take certain elements of our belief and then give them up 00:39:09.110 --> 00:39:12.650 for new elements of a belief based on thinking, that this new element 00:39:12.650 --> 00:39:15.049 of belief is better than the one we give up. 00:39:15.049 --> 00:39:17.079 So we always move along some kind of gradient. 00:39:17.079 --> 00:39:19.789 and the truth does not matter, the gradient matters. 00:39:19.789 --> 00:39:23.650 If you think about teaching for a moment, when I started teaching I often thought: 00:39:23.650 --> 00:39:27.489 Okay, I understand the truth of the subject, the students don't, so I have to 00:39:27.489 --> 00:39:30.069 give this to them and at some point I realized: 00:39:30.069 --> 00:39:33.450 Oh, I changed my mind so many times in the past and I'm probably not going to 00:39:33.450 --> 00:39:35.769 stop changing it in the future. 00:39:35.769 --> 00:39:38.710 I'm always moving along a gradient and I keep moving along a gradient. 00:39:38.710 --> 00:39:43.099 So I'm not moving to truth, I'm moving forward. 00:39:43.099 --> 00:39:45.230 And when we teach our kids we should probably not think about 00:39:45.230 --> 00:39:46.390 how to give them truth. 00:39:46.390 --> 00:39:51.039 We should think about how to put them onto an interesting gradient, that makes them 00:39:51.039 --> 00:39:55.079 explore the world, world of possible beliefs. 00:39:55.079 --> 00:40:03.150 applause 00:40:03.150 --> 00:40:05.359 And this possible beliefs lead us into local minima. 00:40:05.359 --> 00:40:08.150 This is inevitable. This are like valleys and sometimes this valleys are 00:40:08.150 --> 00:40:11.210 neighbouring and we don't understand what the people in the neighbouring 00:40:11.210 --> 00:40:15.700 valley are doing unless we are willing to retrace the steps they have been taken. 00:40:15.700 --> 00:40:19.569 And if you want to get from one valley into the next, we will have to have some kind 00:40:19.569 --> 00:40:21.789 of energy that moves us over the hill. 00:40:21.789 --> 00:40:27.739 We have to have a trajectory were every step works by finding reason to give up 00:40:27.739 --> 00:40:30.380 bit of our current belief and adopt a new belief, because it's somehow 00:40:30.380 --> 00:40:34.739 more useful, more relevant, more consistent and so on. 00:40:34.739 --> 00:40:38.349 Now the problem is that this is not monotonous we can not guarantee that 00:40:38.349 --> 00:40:40.499 we're always climbing, because the problem is, that 00:40:40.499 --> 00:40:44.599 the beliefs themselfs can change our evaluation of the belief. 00:40:44.599 --> 00:40:50.390 It could be for instance that you start believing in a religion and this religion 00:40:50.390 --> 00:40:54.299 could tell you: If you give up the belief in the religion, you're going to face 00:40:54.299 --> 00:40:56.500 eternal damnation in hell. 00:40:56.500 --> 00:40:59.489 As long as you believe in the religion, it's going to be very expensive for you 00:40:59.489 --> 00:41:02.430 to give up the religion, right? If you truly belief in it. 00:41:02.430 --> 00:41:05.109 You're now caught in some kind of attractor. 00:41:05.109 --> 00:41:08.680 Before you believe the religion it is not very dangerous but once you've gotten 00:41:08.680 --> 00:41:13.019 into the attractor it's very, very hard to get out. 00:41:13.019 --> 00:41:16.309 So these belief attractors are actually quite dangerous. 00:41:16.309 --> 00:41:19.920 You can get not only to chaotic behaviour, where you can not guarantee that your 00:41:19.920 --> 00:41:23.470 current belief is better than the last one but you can also get into beliefs that are 00:41:23.470 --> 00:41:26.849 almost impossible to change. 00:41:26.849 --> 00:41:33.739 And that makes it possible to program people to work in societies. 00:41:33.739 --> 00:41:37.529 Social domains are structured by values. Basically a preference is what makes you 00:41:37.529 --> 00:41:40.769 do things, because you anticipate pleasure or displeasure, 00:41:40.769 --> 00:41:45.339 and values make you do things even if you don't anticipate any pleasure. 00:41:45.339 --> 00:41:49.809 These are virtual rewards. They make us do things, because we believe 00:41:49.809 --> 00:41:51.799 that is stuff that is more important then us. 00:41:51.799 --> 00:41:55.109 This is what values are about. 00:41:55.109 --> 00:42:00.690 And these values are the source of what we would call true meaning, deeper meaning. 00:42:00.690 --> 00:42:05.220 There is something that is more important than us, something that we can serve. 00:42:05.220 --> 00:42:08.769 This is what we usually perceive as meaningful life, it is one which 00:42:08.769 --> 00:42:12.759 is in the serves of values that are more important than I myself, 00:42:12.759 --> 00:42:15.749 because after all I'm not that important. I'm just this machine that runs around 00:42:15.749 --> 00:42:20.789 and tries to optimize its pleasure and pain, which is kinda boring. 00:42:20.789 --> 00:42:26.329 So my PI has puzzled me, my principle investigator in the Havard department, 00:42:26.329 --> 00:42:29.349 where I have my desk, Martin Nowak. 00:42:29.349 --> 00:42:33.970 He said, that meaning can not exist without god; you are either religious, 00:42:33.970 --> 00:42:36.950 or you are a nihilist. 00:42:36.950 --> 00:42:42.789 And this guy is the head of the department for evolutionary dynamics. 00:42:42.789 --> 00:42:45.769 Also he is a catholic.. chuckling 00:42:45.769 --> 00:42:49.729 So this really puzzled me and I tried to understand what he meant by this. 00:42:49.729 --> 00:42:53.200 Typically if you are a good atheist like me, 00:42:53.200 --> 00:42:57.920 you tend to attack gods that are structured like this, religious gods, 00:42:57.920 --> 00:43:02.940 that are institutional, they are personal, they are some kind of person. 00:43:02.940 --> 00:43:08.239 They do care about you, they prescribe norms, for instance don't mastrubate 00:43:08.239 --> 00:43:10.060 it's bad for you. 00:43:10.060 --> 00:43:14.759 Many of this norms are very much aligned with societal institutions, for instance 00:43:14.759 --> 00:43:20.799 don't questions the authorities, god wants them to be ruling above you 00:43:20.799 --> 00:43:23.839 and be monogamous and so on and so on. 00:43:23.839 --> 00:43:28.979 So they prescribe norms that do not make a lot of sense in terms of beings that 00:43:28.979 --> 00:43:31.200 creates world every now and then, 00:43:31.200 --> 00:43:34.619 but they make sense in terms of what you should be doing to be a 00:43:34.619 --> 00:43:36.730 functioning member of society. 00:43:36.730 --> 00:43:40.799 And this god also does things like it creates world, they like to manifest as 00:43:40.799 --> 00:43:43.660 burning shrubbery and so on. There are many books that describe stories that 00:43:43.660 --> 00:43:45.700 these gods have allegedly done. 00:43:45.700 --> 00:43:48.819 And it's very hard to test for all these features which makes this gods very 00:43:48.819 --> 00:43:54.280 improbable for us. And makes Atheist very dissatisfied with these gods. 00:43:54.280 --> 00:43:56.569 But then there is a different kind of god. 00:43:56.569 --> 00:43:58.599 This is what we call the spiritual god. 00:43:58.599 --> 00:44:02.410 This spiritual god is independent of institutions, it still does care about you. 00:44:02.410 --> 00:44:06.489 It's probably conscious. It might not be a person. There are not that many stories, 00:44:06.489 --> 00:44:10.579 that you can consistently tell about it, but you might be able to connect to it 00:44:10.579 --> 00:44:15.259 spiritually. 00:44:15.259 --> 00:44:19.470 Then there is a god that is even less expensive. That is god as a transcendental 00:44:19.470 --> 00:44:23.489 principle and this god is simply the reason why there is something rather then 00:44:23.489 --> 00:44:28.150 nothing. This god is the question the universe is the answer to, this is the 00:44:28.150 --> 00:44:29.600 thing that gives meaning. 00:44:29.600 --> 00:44:31.489 Everything else about it is unknowable. 00:44:31.489 --> 00:44:34.190 This is the god of Thomas of Aquinus. 00:44:34.190 --> 00:44:38.089 The God that Thomas of Aquinus discovered is not the god of Abraham this is not the 00:44:38.089 --> 00:44:39.180 religious god. 00:44:39.180 --> 00:44:43.559 It's a god that is basically a principle that us ... the universe into existence. 00:44:43.559 --> 00:44:47.140 It's the one that gives the universe it's purpose. 00:44:47.140 --> 00:44:50.200 And because every other property is unknowable about this, 00:44:50.200 --> 00:44:52.010 this god is not that expensive. 00:44:52.010 --> 00:44:55.960 Unfortunately it doesn't really work. I mean Thomas of Aquinus tried to prove 00:44:55.960 --> 00:45:00.049 god. He tried to prove an necessary god, a god that has to be existing and 00:45:00.049 --> 00:45:02.779 I think we can only prove a possible god. 00:45:02.779 --> 00:45:05.339 So if you try to prove a necessary god, this god can not exist. 00:45:05.339 --> 00:45:11.650 Which means your god prove is going to fail. You can only prove possible gods. 00:45:11.650 --> 00:45:13.259 And then there is an even more improper god. 00:45:13.259 --> 00:45:15.890 And that's the god of Aristotle and he said: 00:45:15.890 --> 00:45:20.069 "If there is change in the universe, something in going to have to change it." 00:45:20.069 --> 00:45:23.640 There must be something that moves it along from one state to the next. 00:45:23.640 --> 00:45:26.289 So I would say that is the primary computational transition function 00:45:26.289 --> 00:45:35.079 of the universe. laughingapplause 00:45:35.079 --> 00:45:38.439 And Aristotle discovered it. It's amazing isn't it? 00:45:38.439 --> 00:45:41.509 We have to have this because we can not be conscious in a single state. 00:45:41.509 --> 00:45:43.279 We need to move between states to be conscious. 00:45:43.279 --> 00:45:45.979 We need to be processes. 00:45:45.979 --> 00:45:50.859 So we can take our gods and sort them by their metaphysical cost. 00:45:50.859 --> 00:45:53.290 The 1st degree god would be the first mover. 00:45:53.290 --> 00:45:56.069 The 2nd degree god is the god of purpose and meaning. 00:45:56.069 --> 00:45:59.089 3rd degree god is the spiritual god. And the 4th degree god is this bound to 00:45:59.089 --> 00:46:01.229 religious institutions, right? 00:46:01.229 --> 00:46:03.720 So if you take this statement from Martin Nowak, 00:46:03.720 --> 00:46:07.759 "You can not have meaning without god!" I would say: yes! You need at least 00:46:07.759 --> 00:46:14.990 a 2nd degree god to have meaning. So objective meaning can only exist 00:46:14.990 --> 00:46:19.119 with a 2nd degree god. chuckling 00:46:19.119 --> 00:46:22.269 And subjective meaning can exist as a function in a cognitive system of course. 00:46:22.269 --> 00:46:24.180 We don't need objective meaning. 00:46:24.180 --> 00:46:27.410 So we can subjectively feel that there is something more important to us 00:46:27.410 --> 00:46:30.509 and this makes us work in society and makes us perceive that we have values 00:46:30.509 --> 00:46:34.329 and so on, but we don't need to believe that there is something outside of the 00:46:34.329 --> 00:46:36.869 universe to have this. 00:46:36.869 --> 00:46:40.650 So the 4th degree god is the one that is bound to religious institutions, 00:46:40.650 --> 00:46:45.400 it requires a belief attractor and it enables complex norm prescriptions. 00:46:45.400 --> 00:46:48.430 It my theory is right then it should be much harder for nerds to believe in 00:46:48.430 --> 00:46:52.039 a 4th degree god then for normal people. 00:46:52.039 --> 00:46:56.489 And what this god does it allows you to have state building mind viruses. 00:46:56.489 --> 00:47:00.269 Basically religion is a mind virus. And the amazing thing about these mind viruses 00:47:00.269 --> 00:47:02.489 is that they structure behaviour in large groups. 00:47:02.489 --> 00:47:06.130 We have evolved to live in small groups of a few 100 individuals, maybe somthing 00:47:06.130 --> 00:47:07.249 like a 150. 00:47:07.249 --> 00:47:10.059 This is roughly the level to which reputation works. 00:47:10.059 --> 00:47:15.369 We can keep track of about 150 people and after this it gets much much worse. 00:47:15.369 --> 00:47:18.290 So in this system where you have reputation people feel responsible 00:47:18.290 --> 00:47:21.349 for each other and they can keep track of their doings 00:47:21.349 --> 00:47:23.049 and society kind of sort of works. 00:47:23.049 --> 00:47:27.789 If you want to go beyond this, you have to right a software that controls people. 00:47:27.789 --> 00:47:32.420 And religions were the first software, that did this on a very large scale. 00:47:32.420 --> 00:47:35.319 And in order to keep stable they had to be designed like operating systems 00:47:35.319 --> 00:47:36.039 in some sense. 00:47:36.039 --> 00:47:39.930 They give people different roles like insects in a hive. 00:47:39.930 --> 00:47:44.529 And they have even as part of this roles is to update this religion but it has to be 00:47:44.529 --> 00:47:48.380 done very carefully and centrally because otherwise the religion will split apart 00:47:48.380 --> 00:47:51.719 and fall together into new religions or be overcome by new ones. 00:47:51.719 --> 00:47:54.259 So there is some kind of evolutionary dynamics that goes on 00:47:54.259 --> 00:47:55.930 with respect to religion. 00:47:55.930 --> 00:47:58.519 And if you look the religions, there is actually a veritable evolution 00:47:58.519 --> 00:47:59.739 of religions. 00:47:59.739 --> 00:48:04.789 So we have this Israelic tradition and the Mesoputanic mythology that gave rise 00:48:04.789 --> 00:48:13.019 to Judaism. applause 00:48:13.019 --> 00:48:16.299 It's kind of cool, right? laughing 00:48:16.299 --> 00:48:36.289 Also history totally repeats itself. roaring laughterapplause 00:48:36.289 --> 00:48:41.889 Yeah, it totally blew my mind when I discovered this. laughter 00:48:41.889 --> 00:48:45.039 Of course the real tree of programming languages is slightly more complicated, 00:48:45.039 --> 00:48:48.599 And the real tree of religion is slightly more complicated. 00:48:48.599 --> 00:48:51.229 But still its neat. 00:48:51.229 --> 00:48:54.289 So if you want to immunize yourself against mind viruses, 00:48:54.289 --> 00:48:58.570 first of all you want to check yourself whether you are infected. 00:48:58.570 --> 00:49:02.809 You should check: Can I let go of my current beliefs without feeling that 00:49:02.809 --> 00:49:07.670 meaning departures me and I feel very terrible, when I let go of my beliefs. 00:49:07.670 --> 00:49:11.279 Also you should check: All the other people around there that don't 00:49:11.279 --> 00:49:17.019 share my belief, are they either stupid, or crazy, or evil? 00:49:17.019 --> 00:49:19.890 If you think this chances are you are infected by some kind of mind virus, 00:49:19.890 --> 00:49:23.710 because they are just part of the out group. 00:49:23.710 --> 00:49:28.059 And does your god have properties that you know but you did not observe. 00:49:28.059 --> 00:49:32.490 So basically you have a god of 2nd or 3rd degree or higher. 00:49:32.490 --> 00:49:34.589 In this case you also probably got a mind virus. 00:49:34.589 --> 00:49:37.259 There is nothing wrong with having a mind virus, 00:49:37.259 --> 00:49:39.920 but if you want to immunize yourself against this people have invented 00:49:39.920 --> 00:49:44.059 rationalism and enlightenment, basically to act as immunization against 00:49:44.059 --> 00:49:50.660 mind viruses. loud applause 00:49:50.660 --> 00:49:53.869 And in some sense its what the mind does by itself because, if you want to 00:49:53.869 --> 00:49:56.949 understand how you go wrong, you need to have a mechanism 00:49:56.949 --> 00:49:58.839 that discovers who you are. 00:49:58.839 --> 00:50:03.109 Some kind of auto debugging mechanism, that makes the mind aware of itself. 00:50:03.109 --> 00:50:04.779 And this is actually the self. 00:50:04.779 --> 00:50:08.339 So according to Robert Kegan: "The development of ourself is a process, 00:50:08.339 --> 00:50:13.400 in which we learn who we are by making thing explicit", by making processes that 00:50:13.400 --> 00:50:17.249 are automatic visible to us and by conceptualize them so we no longer 00:50:17.249 --> 00:50:18.859 identify with them. 00:50:18.859 --> 00:50:22.019 And it starts out with understanding that there is only pleasure and pain. 00:50:22.019 --> 00:50:25.180 If you are a baby, you have only pleasure and pain you identify with this. 00:50:25.180 --> 00:50:27.869 And then you turn into a toddler and the toddler understands that they are not 00:50:27.869 --> 00:50:31.059 their pleasure and pain but they are their impulses. 00:50:31.059 --> 00:50:34.259 And in the next level if you grow beyond the toddler age you actually know that 00:50:34.259 --> 00:50:38.880 you have goals and that your needs and impulses are there to serve goals, but its 00:50:38.880 --> 00:50:40.210 very difficult to let go of the goals, 00:50:40.210 --> 00:50:42.789 if you are a very young child. 00:50:42.789 --> 00:50:46.329 And at some point you realize: Oh, the goals don't really matter, because 00:50:46.329 --> 00:50:49.509 sometimes you can not reach them, but we have preferences, we have thing that we 00:50:49.509 --> 00:50:52.950 want to happen and thing that we do not want to happen. And then at some point 00:50:52.950 --> 00:50:55.869 we realize that other people have preferences, too. 00:50:55.869 --> 00:50:58.979 And then we start to model the world as a system where different people have 00:50:58.979 --> 00:51:01.940 different preferences and we have to navigate this landscape. 00:51:01.940 --> 00:51:06.420 And then we realize that this preferences also relate to values and we start 00:51:06.420 --> 00:51:09.700 to identify with this values as members of society. 00:51:09.700 --> 00:51:13.469 And this is basically the stage if you are an adult being, that you get into. 00:51:13.469 --> 00:51:16.910 And you can get to a stage beyond that, especially if you have people this, which 00:51:16.910 --> 00:51:20.059 have already done this. And this means that you understand that people have 00:51:20.059 --> 00:51:23.660 different values and what they do naturally flows out of them. 00:51:23.660 --> 00:51:26.849 And this values are not necessarily worse than yours they are just different. 00:51:26.849 --> 00:51:29.450 And you learn that you can hold different sets of values in your mind at 00:51:29.450 --> 00:51:33.019 the same time, isn't that amazing? and understand other people, even if 00:51:33.019 --> 00:51:36.660 they are not part of your group. If you get that, this is really good. 00:51:36.660 --> 00:51:39.269 But I don't think it stops there. 00:51:39.269 --> 00:51:43.019 You can also learn that the stuff that you perceive is kind of incidental, 00:51:43.019 --> 00:51:45.339 that you can turn it of and you can manipulate it. 00:51:45.339 --> 00:51:49.940 And at some point you also can realize that yourself is only incidental that you 00:51:49.940 --> 00:51:52.559 can manipulate it or turn it of. And that your basically some kind of 00:51:52.559 --> 00:51:57.420 consciousness that happens to run a brain of some kind of person, that navigates 00:51:57.420 --> 00:52:04.279 the world in terms to get rewards or avoid displeasure and serve values and so on, 00:52:04.279 --> 00:52:05.130 but it doesn't really matter. 00:52:05.130 --> 00:52:08.119 There is just this consciousness which understands the world. 00:52:08.119 --> 00:52:11.009 And this is the stage that we typically call enlightenment. 00:52:11.009 --> 00:52:14.549 In this stage you realize that you are not your brain, but you are a story that 00:52:14.549 --> 00:52:25.640 your brain tells itself. applause 00:52:25.640 --> 00:52:29.630 So becoming self aware is a process of reverse engineering your mind. 00:52:29.630 --> 00:52:32.890 Its a different set of stages in which to realize what goes on. 00:52:32.890 --> 00:52:33.799 So isn't that amazing. 00:52:33.799 --> 00:52:38.930 AI is a way to get to more self awareness? 00:52:38.930 --> 00:52:41.319 I think that is a good point to stop here. 00:52:41.319 --> 00:52:44.499 The first talk that I gave in this series was 2 years ago. It was about 00:52:44.499 --> 00:52:45.979 how to build a mind. 00:52:45.979 --> 00:52:49.670 Last year I talked about how to get from basic computation to consciousness. 00:52:49.670 --> 00:52:53.709 And this year we have talked about finding meaning using AI. 00:52:53.709 --> 00:52:57.470 I wonder where it goes next. laughter 00:52:57.470 --> 00:53:22.769 applause 00:53:22.769 --> 00:53:26.489 Herald: Thank you for this amazing talk! We now have some minutes for Q&A. 00:53:26.489 --> 00:53:31.190 So please line up at the microphones as always. If you are unable to stand up 00:53:31.190 --> 00:53:36.430 for some reason please very very visibly rise your hand, we should be able to dispatch 00:53:36.430 --> 00:53:40.099 an audio angle to your location so you can have a question too. 00:53:40.099 --> 00:53:44.030 And also if you are locationally disabled, you are not actually in the room 00:53:44.030 --> 00:53:49.069 if you are on the stream, you can use IRC or twitter to also ask questions. 00:53:49.069 --> 00:53:50.989 We also have a person for that. 00:53:50.989 --> 00:53:53.779 We will start at microphone number 2. 00:53:53.779 --> 00:53:59.940 Q: Wow that's me. Just a guess! What would you guess, when can you discuss 00:53:59.940 --> 00:54:04.559 your talk with a machine, in how many years? 00:54:04.559 --> 00:54:07.400 Joscha: I don't know! As a software engineer I know if I don't have the 00:54:07.400 --> 00:54:12.619 specification all bets are off, until I have the implementation. laughter 00:54:12.619 --> 00:54:14.509 So it can be of any order of magnitude. 00:54:14.509 --> 00:54:18.249 I have a gut feeling but I also know as a software engineer that my gut feeling is 00:54:18.249 --> 00:54:23.450 usually wrong, laughter until I have the specification. 00:54:23.450 --> 00:54:28.200 So the question is if there are silver bullets? Right now there are some things 00:54:28.200 --> 00:54:30.569 that are not solved yet and it could be that they are easier to solve 00:54:30.569 --> 00:54:33.469 than we think, but it could be that they're harder to solve than we think. 00:54:33.469 --> 00:54:36.710 Before I stumbled on this cortical self organization thing, 00:54:36.710 --> 00:54:40.719 I thought it's going to be something like maybe 60, 80 years and now I think it's 00:54:40.719 --> 00:54:47.289 way less, but again this is a very subjective perspective. I don't know. 00:54:47.289 --> 00:54:49.240 Herald: Number 1, please! 00:54:49.240 --> 00:54:55.589 Q: Yes, I wanted to ask a little bit about metacognition. It seems that you kind of 00:54:55.589 --> 00:55:01.329 end your story saying that it's still reflecting on input that you get and 00:55:01.329 --> 00:55:04.900 kind of working with your social norms and this and that, but Colberg 00:55:04.900 --> 00:55:11.839 for instance talks about what he calls a postconventional universal morality 00:55:11.839 --> 00:55:17.420 for instance, which is thinking about moral laws without context, basically 00:55:17.420 --> 00:55:23.069 stating that there is something beyond the relative norm that we have to each other, 00:55:23.069 --> 00:55:29.579 which would only be possible if you can do kind of, you know, meta cognition, 00:55:29.579 --> 00:55:32.599 thinking about your own thinking and then modifying that thinking. 00:55:32.599 --> 00:55:37.229 So kind of feeding back your own ideas into your own mind and coming up with 00:55:37.229 --> 00:55:43.779 stuff that actually can't get ... well processing external inputs. 00:55:43.779 --> 00:55:48.469 Joscha: Mhm! I think it's very tricky. This project of defining morality without 00:55:48.469 --> 00:55:53.119 societies exists longer than Kant of course. And Kant tried to give this 00:55:53.119 --> 00:55:56.869 internal rules and others tried to. I find this very difficult. 00:55:56.869 --> 00:56:01.069 From my perspective we are just moving bits of rocks. And this bits of rocks they 00:56:01.069 --> 00:56:07.589 are on some kind of dust mode in a galaxy out of trillions of galaxies and how can 00:56:07.589 --> 00:56:08.609 there be meaning? 00:56:08.609 --> 00:56:11.180 It's very hard for me to say: 00:56:11.180 --> 00:56:13.969 One chimpanzee species is better than another chimpanzee species or 00:56:13.969 --> 00:56:16.559 a particular monkey is better than another monkey. 00:56:16.559 --> 00:56:18.539 This only happens within a certain framework 00:56:18.539 --> 00:56:20.160 and we have to set this framework. 00:56:20.160 --> 00:56:23.700 And I don't think that we can define this framework outside of a context of 00:56:23.700 --> 00:56:26.420 social norms, that we have to agree on. 00:56:26.420 --> 00:56:29.650 So objectively I'm not sure if we can get to ethics. 00:56:29.650 --> 00:56:33.769 I only think that is possible based on some kind of framework that people 00:56:33.769 --> 00:56:38.339 have to agree on implicitly or explicitly. 00:56:38.339 --> 00:56:40.630 Herald: Microphone number 4, please. 00:56:40.630 --> 00:56:46.559 Q: Hi, thank you, it was a fascinating talk. I have 2 thought that went through my mind. 00:56:46.559 --> 00:56:51.589 And the first one is that it's so convincing the models that you present, 00:56:51.589 --> 00:56:56.709 but it's kind of like you present another metaphor of understanding the 00:56:56.709 --> 00:57:01.670 brain which is still something that we try to grasp on different levels of science 00:57:01.670 --> 00:57:07.469 basically. And the 2nd one is that your definition of the nerd who walks 00:57:07.469 --> 00:57:10.950 and doesn't see the walls is kind of definition... or reminds me 00:57:10.950 --> 00:57:15.229 Richard Rortys definition of the ironist which is a person who knows that their 00:57:15.229 --> 00:57:20.799 vocabulary is finite and that other people have also a finite vocabulary and 00:57:20.799 --> 00:57:24.599 then that obviously opens up the whole question of meaning making which has been 00:57:24.599 --> 00:57:28.979 discussed in so many other disciplines and fields. 00:57:28.979 --> 00:57:32.930 And I thought about Darridas deconstruction of ideas and thoughts and 00:57:32.930 --> 00:57:36.300 Butler and then down the rabbit hole to Nietzsche and I was just wondering, 00:57:36.300 --> 00:57:39.009 if you could maybe map out other connections 00:57:39.009 --> 00:57:44.430 where basically not AI helping us to understand the mind, but where 00:57:44.430 --> 00:57:49.819 already existing huge, huge fields of science, like cognitive process 00:57:49.819 --> 00:57:53.359 coming from the other end could help us to understand AI. 00:57:53.359 --> 00:57:59.680 Joscha: Thank you, the tradition that you mentioned Rorty and Butler and so on 00:57:59.680 --> 00:58:02.989 are part of a completely different belief attractor in my current perspective. 00:58:02.989 --> 00:58:06.209 That is they are mostly social constructionists. 00:58:06.209 --> 00:58:10.880 They believe that reality at least in the domains of the mind and sociality 00:58:10.880 --> 00:58:15.359 are social constructs they are part of social agreement. 00:58:15.359 --> 00:58:17.190 Personally I don't think that this is the case. 00:58:17.190 --> 00:58:19.630 I think that patterns that we refer to 00:58:19.630 --> 00:58:23.890 are mostly independent of your mind. The norms are part of social constructs, 00:58:23.890 --> 00:58:28.099 but for instance our motivational preferences that make us adapt or 00:58:28.099 --> 00:58:32.719 reject norms, are something that builds up resistance to the environment. 00:58:32.719 --> 00:58:35.660 So they are probably not part of social agreement. 00:58:35.660 --> 00:58:41.569 And the only thing I can invite you to is try to retrace both of the different 00:58:41.569 --> 00:58:45.640 belief attractors, try to retrace the different paths on the landscape. 00:58:45.640 --> 00:58:48.529 All this thing that I tell you, all of this is of course very speculative. 00:58:48.529 --> 00:58:52.390 These are that seem to be logical to me at this point in my life. 00:58:52.390 --> 00:58:55.400 And I try to give you the arguments why I think that is plausible, but don't 00:58:55.400 --> 00:58:59.109 believe in them, question them, challenge them, see if they work for you! 00:58:59.109 --> 00:59:00.559 I'm not giving you any truth. 00:59:00.559 --> 00:59:05.720 I'm just going to give you suitable encodings according to my current perspective. 00:59:05.720 --> 00:59:11.739 Q:Thank you! applause 00:59:11.739 --> 00:59:15.099 Herald: The internet, please! 00:59:19.179 --> 00:59:26.029 Signal angel: So, someone is asking if in this belief space you're talking about 00:59:26.029 --> 00:59:30.109 how is it possible to get out of local minima? 00:59:30.109 --> 00:59:33.959 And very related question as well: 00:59:33.959 --> 00:59:38.530 Should we teach some momentum method to our children, 00:59:38.530 --> 00:59:41.599 so we don't get stuck in a local minima. 00:59:41.599 --> 00:59:44.829 Joscha: I believe at some level it's not possible to get out of a local minima. 00:59:44.829 --> 00:59:50.329 In an absolute sense, because you only get to get into some kind of meta minimum, 00:59:50.329 --> 00:59:56.769 but what you can do is to retrace the path that you took whenever you discover 00:59:56.769 --> 00:59:59.989 that somebody else has a fundamentally different set of beliefs. 00:59:59.989 --> 01:00:02.769 And if you realize that this person is basically a smart person that is not 01:00:02.769 --> 01:00:07.359 completely insane but has reasons to believe in their beliefs and they seem to 01:00:07.359 --> 01:00:10.579 be internally consistent it's usually worth to retrace what they 01:00:10.579 --> 01:00:12.180 have been thinking and why. 01:00:12.180 --> 01:00:15.930 And this means you have to understand where their starting point was and 01:00:15.930 --> 01:00:18.279 how they moved from their current point to their starting point. 01:00:18.279 --> 01:00:22.219 You might not be able to do this accurately and the important thing is 01:00:22.219 --> 01:00:25.369 also afterwards you discover a second valley, you haven't discovered 01:00:25.369 --> 01:00:27.059 the landscape inbetween. 01:00:27.059 --> 01:00:30.839 But the only way that we can get an idea of the lay of the land is that we try to 01:00:30.839 --> 01:00:33.200 retrace as many paths as possible. 01:00:33.200 --> 01:00:36.339 And if we try to teach our children, what I think what we should be doing is: 01:00:36.339 --> 01:00:38.650 To tell them how to explore this world on there own. 01:00:38.650 --> 01:00:43.900 It's not that we tell them this is the valley, basically it's given, it's 01:00:43.900 --> 01:00:47.599 the truth, but instead we have to tell them: This is the path that we took. 01:00:47.599 --> 01:00:51.239 And these are the things that we saw inbetween and it is important to be not 01:00:51.239 --> 01:00:54.390 completely naive when we go into this landscape, but we also have to understand 01:00:54.390 --> 01:00:58.170 that it's always an exploration that never stops and that might change 01:00:58.170 --> 01:01:01.140 everything that you believe now at a later point. 01:01:01.140 --> 01:01:05.700 So for me it's about teaching my own children how to be explorers, 01:01:05.700 --> 01:01:10.950 how to understand that knowledge is always changing and it's always a moving frontier. 01:01:10.950 --> 01:01:17.230 applause 01:01:17.230 --> 01:01:22.259 Herald: We are unfortunately out of time. So, please once again thank Joscha! 01:01:22.259 --> 01:01:24.069 applause Joscha: Thank you! 01:01:24.069 --> 01:01:28.239 applause 01:01:28.239 --> 01:01:32.719 postroll music 01:01:32.719 --> 01:01:40.000 subtitles created by c3subtitles.de Join, and help us!