Joscha Bach
AI Researcher & Cognitive Scientist
About
Joscha Bach is an AI researcher and cognitive scientist known for his work on cognitive architectures and the nature of mind. His MicroPsi project models motivation, emotion, and cognition in artificial agents. Bach offers a unique perspective on consciousness and intelligence, arguing that minds are self-organizing patterns in information processing systems. His talks blend computer science, philosophy, and psychology to explore how minds—artificial or biological—might actually work.
Key Contributions
- Developed MicroPsi, a cognitive architecture modeling perception, motivation, emotion, and action in artificial agents
- Wrote 'Principles of Synthetic Intelligence,' turning motivated cognition into a detailed architecture rather than a metaphor
- Argues that minds are self-modeling information processes, connecting AI design to theories of consciousness
- Offers one of the clearest public syntheses of cognitive architectures, symbolic systems, and modern machine learning
- Treats AGI as an engineering and philosophy problem, not only a scaling problem
- His explanations are unusually accessible, though the breadth of the synthesis sometimes outruns empirical consensus
