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From the Foreword: "In this book Joscha Bach introduces Dietrich Dörner's PSI architecture and Joscha's implementation of the MicroPSI architecture. These architectures and their implementation have several lessons for other architectures and models. Most notably, the PSI architecture includes drives and thus directly addresses questions of emotional behavior. An architecture including drives helps clarify how emotions could arise. It also changes the way that the architecture works on a fundamental level, providing an architecture more suited for behaving autonomously in a simulated world. PSI includes three types of drives, physiological (e.g., hunger), social (i.e., affiliation needs), a...
My books are about one thing and that is the mind. 1. Where did our mind come from in a natural point of facts. 2. What did our mind do during its historical, cultural existence for the past 100.000 years. 3. Who owns and who controls our mind. We don’t actually control our mind and makes Free Will an ambition and not a fact. The Centers of Power control our mind for the last 5.000 years, we have made simulations about believing in a god and call it religion. We have made simulations about society in believing in governments, laws and politician and call it statism. 4. In my books I explore solutions to live as a free individual and that is only possible if we all live in a free world, ...
A BOOK OF THE YEAR GUARDIAN , THE ECONOMIST, NEW STATESMAN, FINANCIAL TIMES, BLOOMBERG Anil Seth's radical new theory of consciousness challenges our understanding of perception and reality, doing for brain science what Dawkins did for evolutionary biology. 'A brilliant beast of a book.' DAVID BYRNE 'Hugely important.' JIM AL-KHALILI 'Masterly . . . An exhilarating book: a vast-ranging, phenomenal achievement that will undoubtedly become a seminal text.' GAIA VINCE, GUARDIAN Being You is not as simple as it sounds. Somehow, within each of our brains, billions of neurons work to create our conscious experience. How does this happen? Why do we experience life in the first person? After over tw...
Why does modern life revolve around objectives? From how science is funded, to improving how children are educated -- and nearly everything in-between -- our society has become obsessed with a seductive illusion: that greatness results from doggedly measuring improvement in the relentless pursuit of an ambitious goal. In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, Stanley and Lehman begin with a surprising scientific discovery in artificial intelligence that leads ultimately to the conclusion that the objective obsession has gone too far. They make the case that great achievement can't be bottled up into mechanical metrics; that innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort; and that we would be wiser (and the outcomes better) if instead we whole-heartedly embraced serendipitous discovery and playful creativity. Controversial at its heart, yet refreshingly provocative, this book challenges readers to consider life without a destination and discovery without a compass.
A leading philosopher takes a mind-bending journey through virtual worlds, illuminating the nature of reality and our place within it. Virtual reality is genuine reality; that’s the central thesis of Reality+. In a highly original work of “technophilosophy,” David J. Chalmers gives a compelling analysis of our technological future. He argues that virtual worlds are not second-class worlds, and that we can live a meaningful life in virtual reality. We may even be in a virtual world already. Along the way, Chalmers conducts a grand tour of big ideas in philosophy and science. He uses virtual reality technology to offer a new perspective on long-established philosophical questions. How do we know that there’s an external world? Is there a god? What is the nature of reality? What’s the relation between mind and body? How can we lead a good life? All of these questions are illuminated or transformed by Chalmers’ mind-bending analysis. Studded with illustrations that bring philosophical issues to life, Reality+ is a major statement that will shape discussion of philosophy, science, and technology for years to come.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2019, held in Shenzhen, China, in August 2019. The 16 full papers and 5 poster papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 30 submissions. The papers are covering AGI architectures, discussing mathematical foundations, philosophical foundations, safety and ethics, and developing ideas from neuroscience and cognitive science.
The conscious mind is life as we experience it; we see the world, feel our emotions and think our thoughts thanks to consciousness. This book provides an easy introduction to the foundations of consciousness; how can subjective consciousness be measured scientifically? What happens to the conscious mind and self when the brain gets injured? How does consciousness, our subjective self or soul, arise from the activities of the brain? Addressing the philosophical and historical roots of the problems alongside current scientific approaches to consciousness in psychology and neuroscience, Foundations of Consciousness examines key questions as well as delving deeper to look at altered and higher s...
This book is a collection of writings by active researchers in the field of Artificial General Intelligence, on topics of central importance in the field. Each chapter focuses on one theoretical problem, proposes a novel solution, and is written in sufficiently non-technical language to be understandable by advanced undergraduates or scientists in allied fields. This book is the very first collection in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) focusing on theoretical, conceptual, and philosophical issues in the creation of thinking machines. All the authors are researchers actively developing AGI projects, thus distinguishing the book from much of the theoretical cognitive science ...
A bold, provocative history of our species finds the roots of civilization’s success and failure in our evolutionary biology. We are living through the most prosperous age in all of human history, yet people are more listless, divided and miserable than ever. Wealth and comfort are unparalleled, and yet our political landscape grows ever more toxic, and rates of suicide, loneliness, and chronic illness continue to skyrocket. How do we explain the gap between these two truths? What's more, what can we do to close it? For evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, the cause of our woes is clear: the modern world is out of sync with our ancient brains and bodies. We evolved to...
Paperback version of the 2002 paper published in the journal Progress in Information, Complexity, and Design (PCID). ABSTRACT Inasmuch as science is observational or perceptual in nature, the goal of providing a scientific model and mechanism for the evolution of complex systems ultimately requires a supporting theory of reality of which perception itself is the model (or theory-to-universe mapping). Where information is the abstract currency of perception, such a theory must incorporate the theory of information while extending the information concept to incorporate reflexive self-processing in order to achieve an intrinsic (self-contained) description of reality. This extension is associat...