Deconstructing Yourself

Host Michael Taft speaks with Joscha Bach about artificial intelligence; the sense of self; building a civilizational intellect; what it is like to be a mind?; the relationships between motivation, emotion, and behavior; the “cargo cult” model of civilization; what is learning?; how artificial minds may be different from human minds, the enlightenment industry, the Tower of Babel myth; and much more.Dr. Joscha Bach is an Artificial Intelligence researcher at MIT and Harvard who works and writes about cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. Bach’s mission to build a model of the mind is the bedrock research in the creation of Strong Artificial Intelligence, i.e. cognition on par with that of a human being.He is especially interested in the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence and in the augmentation of the human mind.You can help to create future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.