Re: Joscha Bach

Below from Joscha Bach Re we will not be purchasing him tickets to conference in Tucson:

No problem at all. Was he opposed to me presenting at the Science of Consciousness Conference?

Sent from my iPhone

you can purchase tickets for him just not for his family

Dear Jeffrey,

Thank you!

The Canonical Computation in Brains and Machines symposium (here at NYU) is really worth it, the highlight was Yann LeCun today, explaining how learning is mostly not working on actual real-world data but on predictive simulations (so we anticipate being hit by a car and learn from that, instead having to try it).

Yesterday's highlight was a coffee break conversation with Jean-Remi King, a member of Dehaene's lab, about consciousness. They have a very sober perspective, neither the misidentification of descriptive brain scans with the processes that must be implemented, nor the bright lunacy of the Hameroff crowd.

Regardless, last year's Science of Consciousness conference triggered a number of insights for me. Especially, I began to understand what Penrose and Hameroff and Tagg and Tononi are trying to achieve. Their projects are doomed, I think, because they all make mechanistic theories of a domain that they consider to be not computational (consciousness cannot be mechanical they think), but I see why they have no choice but to try anyway. No computational model can explain consciousness happening in real-time and actuality, so they must be looking for a meta computational system, which unfortunately also must be outside the realm of formal theorizing, I think. Conversely, Dehaene, Frankish, Dennett, Graziano and Drescher (and me) don't think that consciousness does happen in actuality, but is essentially just a memory of experiences that did not necessarily happen, so it is much easier to explain.

I got invited to participate in a panel on this year's Science of Consciousness in Tucson, and they also accepted my talk on meta computation. Are you planning to come this year?

– Joscha