How to make Ubena Spaghettigewürz

I grew up in the household of very busy artists, which meant that I had to learn how to cook my own food long before I had the chance to form reasonable ideas about what constitutes a healthy meal. As a result, my favorite dishes include roasted Thuringian potato dumplings, apple rice and crunchily fried spaghetti. 

The most important ingredient to fried spaghetti (besides thinly grated gouda) is Ubena Spaghetti-Gewürzmischung. 

Why Artificial Intelligence won't just be a bit smarter than humans

If building human-level Artificial Intelligence is possible, it will mean that we have solved the puzzle of the human mind. Replicating the puzzle pieces artificially and putting them together will not give us a system that is prone to the limits imposed by biological human brains: artificial brains will probably scale much better than biological ones, and our AIs will have more memory, more accuracy, more speed, more ability for integration of mental content, better problem solving capacity, practically infinite attention span and focusing abilities, and so on. 

Jaron Lanier pisses me off

Jaron Lanier's piece on Edge ("The Myth of AI") has sparked quite a bit of discussion in my field, and he really pisses me off. He starts out with a straw man argument, by insinuating that suspect (and dominant, most wealthy!) parts of the tech culture believe that computers were people, and that this would be intrinsically linked to the idea that algorithms were equivalent to life.

I think that is utter rubbish. We may believe that people are computers, and that life is a set of algorithms (i.e., the inverse of what Lanier claims), but we are acutely aware that computers are simply devices for the creation of causal contexts that are stable enough to run software, and for the most part, we do not care about the metaphysics of biological systems.

From Computation to Consciousness

During the 31st Chaos Communication Congress, I had the opportunity to talk about how a computational universe can give rise to consciousness.



(alternate Link)

A tale of two machines

How is it possible that we can be conscious of a universe that at the same time computes us? How can we observe the progression of a universe that we are part of? Assuming that our mind is fully embedded into our universe: If the universe would suddenly stop its computations, we could not notice. At every moment, we only exist in a single state. Single states cannot give rise to experience, as any mental process requires a sequence of states (for instance, to retrieve a memory and become aware of its contents).
"Cogito ergo sum" does not work for me: access to and interpretation of the idea that I seem to exist and cogitate in this moment requires a long computational process, which means that I have to introduce additional assumptions beyond the single state the universe offers in the present.
How can we resolve this?

Discussing social constructionism with my daughter

She looked at me gravely. “Without me pointing at the same things as you do, without this intersubjectivity, how could there be any referential meaning?” she said. “You would not know that this situation is reality, if not for another, independent person to confirm it.”

I looked into her alert baby eyes and suddenly realized that my 14month old daughter is unlikely to express this stupid argument so eloquently. Argh, one of these dreams again! But I love the way my impertinent referentialist daughter lost the argument against her anti-realist dad.
As I awake from a dream turned lucid, I feel both exhilarated and the pang of melancholy of not yet being able to have that conversation with her nascent mind.

Computationalist Essentialism

True Computation is only possible in a silicon substrate. Brains cannot compute. It might look as if a brain could compute, but brains can only simulate computation. Obviously, nature is not able to imitate the computation feats of a silicon processor, but just as a thought experiment, some philosophers have suggested that a brain could take in the same inputs as a silicon chip, and return the same results. But that would not be True Computation. Just as a simulated thunderstorm cannot make you wet, and simulated money cannot make you rich, simulated computation lacks an essential element that can only be supplied by the intrinsic powers of silicon transistors.