# Joscha Bach **Domain:** Cognitive Architecture / Artificial Intelligence / Philosophy of Mind **Doc Type:** Person Node **Maturity:** Developing **Related:** [[wiki/Cognitive Architecture|Cognitive Architecture]], [[wiki/Recursive Self-Model|Recursive Self-Model]], [[wiki/Mechanistic Intelligence|Mechanistic Intelligence]] --- ## Definition **Joscha Bach** is a cognitive scientist and AI researcher known for work on computational cognitive architectures, including MicroPsi, and for mechanistic accounts of motivation, emotion, mental representation, and self-modeling. ## Corpus Context [[articles/Mechanistic Intelligence Is Humanity's Greatest Liberation|Mechanistic Intelligence Is Humanity's Greatest Liberation]] uses Bach's functional account of consciousness as an important contemporary formulation of [[wiki/Mechanistic Intelligence|Mechanistic Intelligence]]. The article accepts the architectural claim that consciousness can emerge from recursively available self-modeling and control while preserving its own vocabulary for embodiment, material process, and continuity. ## Relationships - **Edge source route:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] connects this topic to exact Annual Question passages promoted into the Simple Reminders archive. ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > "The speed of the fastest birds did not turn out to be a limit to airplanes, and artificial minds will be faster, more accurate, more alert, more aware and comprehensive than their human counterparts." > **— Joscha Bach**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Machine Succession/Artificial Minds Will Surpass Biological Limits by Joscha Bach|Artificial Minds Will Surpass Biological Limits by Joscha Bach]] > “A growing number of physicists understand that the universe is not mathematical, but computational, and physics is in the business of finding an algorithm that can reproduce our observations. The switch from uncomputable, mathematical notions (such as continuous space) makes progress possible. Climate science, molecular genetics, and AI are computational sciences. Sociology, psychology, and neuroscience are not: they still seem to be confused by the apparent dichotomy between mechanism (rigid, moving parts) and the objects of their study. They are looking for social, behavioral, chemical, neural regularities, where they should be looking for computational ones.” > **— Joscha Bach**, *2016, Edge Annual Question, “What Do You Consider The Most Interesting Recent [Scientific] News? What Makes It Important?”* [[reminders/AI Control/Everything Is Computation by Joscha Bach|Everything Is Computation by Joscha Bach]] ## Sources / Provenance - [Joscha Bach — personal site](https://bach.ai/) - [Joscha Bach — curriculum vitae](https://bach.ai/pub/CV%20Joscha%20Bach.pdf) ## See Also [[wiki/Cognitive Architecture|Cognitive Architecture]] · [[wiki/Recursive Self-Model|Recursive Self-Model]] · [[wiki/Self-Reference|Self-Reference]] · [[wiki/Mechanistic Intelligence|Mechanistic Intelligence]] · [[wiki/Consciousness Emergence|Consciousness Emergence]]