From: Lawrence Krauss 5
To: Jeffrey Epstein <jeevacation®gmail.com>
Cc: ’ Krauss" < Subject: Fwd: Origins Programs
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2010 17:13:03 +0000
here is draft of a proposal I sent to Bamaby… but of course I would be happier if Florida Science Foundation at least partnered… 
LMK
Begin forwarded message:
From: Lawrence Krauss <
Date: November 29, 2010 10:10:29 AM MST To: Krauss" bmarsh@templeton.org
Subject: Origins Programs
Barnaby: Hi… will I see you in Dec?
fr"
Just got back from Oz… Here is a draft of a proposal for a variety of ongoing origins initiatives… let me know what you think…
Further to our last phone conversation, here are programs that will be supported by Origins on an Ongoing basis, including long term workshops, research, and outreach. I would like to request $1M/program to support these ongoing efforts over a 3 year period (i.e. $3331Uy/program/yr).
I. Origins of Morality, in collaboration with Sandra Day O’Conner Law School at ASU and Cambridge University: We are embarking on a long term series of programs aimed at exploring the evolutionary origins of the sense of morality and then exploring the implications, if any, that these origins have for ethics or meta- ethics. We have already brought together a workshop of leading philosophers and neuroscientists, and ethicists to explore this issue, including, to name just a few, Simon Blackburn, Stephen Pinker, Josh Greene, and Peter Singer. (We also hosted a public event, called The Great Debate, Can Science Tell Right from Wrong, at which 2000 members of the public attended a series of presentations and discussions on this issue.) We plan to continue to explore this issue, bringing together an even more diverse group, including most importantly evolutionary biologists, to follow up on the issues raised in our initial workshop, for a series of extended discussions and workshops, both at Cambridge and at ASU. The goal will be to produce a comprehensive series of volumes on this issue, exploring the science and philosophy from a variety of perspectives
- Origins of Creativity and Social Complexity, with School of Life Sciences and Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity:
We have, at ASU, an impressive collection of biologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists examining the nature of social dynamics. Key members of this collaboration include Bert Holldoebler, one of the world’s experts on ant physiology and social dynamics, Manfred Laublicher, co-director of the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity, and Sander Van de Leeuw, Director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. In collaboration with scientists at the Santa Fe Institute, we plan to launch a comprehensive and broad
Barnaby Marsh
EFTA00751595
program exploring the dynamics of social systems, from insects to humans, as seen from a variety of perspectives, biological, mathematical, anthropological, and sociological.
-
Origins of Human Uniqueness and Early Modem Hominids: with Institute of Human Origins and School of Human Evolution and Social Change, ASU: Spearheaded by Anthropologist Kim Hill and Paleontologist Curtis Marean, we have begun a comprehensive and broad new program exploring the Origins of Human Uniqueness. In the spring of 2010 we hosted a groundbreaking workshop on the subject, bringing together a group of anthropologists, psychologists, geneticists, evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, and social scientists to explore precisely what properties differentiated early modem hominids from other species, leading to their evolutionary success, and at the same time to explore how these properties may have arisen. This program is continuing, and we are making a major recruiting effort to bring some of the world’s best known cultural anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists together to help direct a long term effort to produce breakthroughs in understanding in this area.
-
What is Life and How did it Begin?, an RNA world revisited, with Florida Science Foundation: We are beginning a new program exploring the origins of life, both on earth and elsewhere, drawing on expertise from asu astrobiologists who are currently directing one of the 7 NASA Astrobiology institutes, and also being co- directed by Nobel Laureate Sidney Altma, who has come to ASU as a Distinguished Origins Visiting Professor.
We will be running a workshop on an RNA world in February 2011 in order to begin to explore these issues and ascertain areas of potential progress.
-
Dark Matter and the Origins of Cosmic Structures, with Cosmology Initiative at ASU: The Universe has devoted substantial resources to a new cosmology initiative at ASU, and we have recently recruited six new faculty. The goal of this program is to explore the microphysical processes, from the Big Bang onwards, that have resulted in our present universe, and to explore the ongoing dynamics of our universe to anticipate its long term future as well. Topics we are exploring include, multiverses and extra dimensions, inflation and the early universe, dark matter and dark energy, topological defects and the origin of magnetic fields. gravitational wave generation, black holes, big bang nucleosynthesis, neutrino astrophysics, galaxy and structure formation, star formation and planet formation.
-
Origins of the Laws of Nature, with Beyond Center at ASU: Our empirical understanding of the universe has made great strides over the past four decades, leading us to the edge of exploring meta-questions such as:
Is our Universe Unique? Are the laws of nature merely environmental? Why are there four known forces and three families of elementary particles? What is the nature of gravity? The Origins Project, in associated with the Beyond Center at ASU is working on these issues. Spearheading part of this program is Distinguished Origins Visiting Professor and Nobel Laureate Frank Wliczek, and recent Beyond hire, Maulik Parikh. We have already hosted one workshop on the nature of gravity, and are planning to continue to explore these issues with an active visitor program.
Lawrence M. Krauss
Foundation Professor
Director, The ASU Origins Project Co-Director, Cosmology Initiative Assoc. Dir, Beyond Center
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY College of Liberal Arts and Sciences School of Earth and Space Exploration PO Box 871404 ITempe AZ 85287-1404
Exec. Asst ( Origins Asst
EFTA00751596
The Computational Structure of Mental Representation Joscha Bach
Berlin, February 26th, 2013
Now is the time for starting a new ArtificialIntelligence initiative.
Whatis themind?
-this is arguably the most interesting question that our species can ask itself.
Last month, a grand proposal by Barack Obama made headlines everywhere in the world: He suggested a large-scale initiative to createa detailedmap of the activity of the human brain,at the level ofindividual neurons. This idea is quite similar to (and likely inspired by) Henry Markram’s Blue Brain project in Lausanne, which recently won a 1.5Bn grant from the European Union. While this is an interesting project in its own right, it willnotaddressthekeyquestionofcognitivescience:
What is the mind? What are the building blocks and fundamentaloperationsofthinkingandperception?
Here, I would like to suggest the instigation of a project that is atoncemoreambitious,morenarrowly targeted,andlikely to yield more profound theoretical, practical and cultural insights thantheBrainActivityMappinginitiative:Thestudyofthe computational structure ofmental representation.
Cognition is incidentally enabled by human nervous systems, but in its nature, it is not a chemical, biological or physiological phenomenon. Instead, cognitive systems are a class of information processingsystems,thinking isasetofcertain, functionally identifiable operations, over certain, functionally identifiable typesofrepresentations,and with respect to aset of problems and properties given by certain environments.
Thus,theStructureofMentalRepresentationinitiativeshould focus on mental content, with all its dynamic, relational, conceptual, and linguistic elements, and it’s grounding in perception and interaction.
Mental representation, not neurons will inform the core our understanding of cognition.
1
EFTA01092999
Thestudyofmental representations requires a new scientific discipline
Unravelingmentalrepresentationswillbeaninterdisciplinary effort amongseveral cognitive sciences,but distinct from the disciplines that we find now:
Theprojectwilldiffer fromlinguistics,forinstance,in similar way as geography differs from plate tectonics. Where linguists study the intrinsic ‘geography’ oflanguages,and the structural commonalities among them, mental representations uncover the underlying dynamics that produce natural languages (as thesolutionstotheproblemoftranslatingbetween hierarchical, distributed, associative, ambiguous representationsandthediscretestringsofsymbolsthatweuse asameansofexchangingandorganizingideas).
Mentalrepresentationslieoutsidethedomainofneuroscience, which mostly focuses on material descriptions of the function oftheunderlyingsubstrate.Theycannotbestudiedwellwithin contemporary psychology, which favors an experimentalist, quantitative approach, where we need to address qualitative questions by constructing working, implementable systems. Andneedlesstosay,thestudyofmentalrepresentationsis currently not well represented in Artificial Intelligence research, which does provide a productive methodology, but hasmostlyturnedtowardsapplicationsandnarrowAl solutions.
Despite the lack of a common methodological ground between the cognitive sciences, we can now observe a growing consensusonhowtoapproachtheproblemofmodelingthe mind, and its representational apparatus. During the last decade, a number of initiatives have sprung up within Al, psychologyandcognitivescience,eachwithjournals, workshops and conference series, and a large personal overlap among each community.Examples include Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (RICA), Cognitive Systems, and Cognitive Modeling (ICCM). Among those groups, there is an emerging consensus on several paradigms:
Integratedarchitecturesofcognition.Weneedtostudy whole,workingsystems,both for thepurposeof comparison between approaches, but mainly, because cognitionisnottheproductoftheactivityofindividual modular functions, but of the interaction between them.
Universal representations. Representations must provide both distributed and localist aspects, to enable neural learning, information retrieval via spreading activation, as well as symbolic processing (language and planning).
Perceptual grounding.Representations should be grounded in an environmental interaction context, using a bottom-up/top-down perception paradigm, to allow for
Integrating concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology and neuroscience within the methodologicalframework of constructionist Artificial Intelligence
A new common ground between Al and cognitive science researchers
2
EFTA01093000
open-ended autonomous learning and language acquisition.
Integration ofperception and action.Environmental interaction is (at least partially) a control process that requiresamodelingoftherelationshipbetweensensory data and operations performed by the system.
(Semi-) Universal problem solving, enabling paradigms oflearning,planning,reasoning,analogies,language acquisition and reflection.
A structured memory, including provisions for a world/situationmodel,aprotocolofenvironmental interactions, procedural memory, declarative and typologicalabstractions,amodelofself,anda’mental stage’, to facilitate anticipation and planning.
Decisionmakingandmotivationalmechanisms,to address both autonomous,goal-directed cognition in complex,opendomains,andthegenesisofgoalsand intentions.
The direction and modulation of attention, and the emergence of emotion and affect, which are configurationalaspectsofcognitionthateitherreflectthe allocationofcognitiveresources,orstructuresocial interaction.
Constraints for MentalRepresentations
Basedontheemergentparadigmofanewgenerationof cognitive architectures, we can think about mental representations in a new and productive way. More specifically, we know that mental representations include perceptual and propositional/conceptualcontentandweareawareofmany constraints. Mental representations must
Offer support for both connectionist and symbolic processing (including compositionality and grammatical structures),with thelatter onebeinga specialcaseofthe former
Possess a hierarchical structure, bottoming out in sensory perception
Cover prototypes, Individuals and abstractions
Include perceptual and relational features, objects, situations, and episodic knowledge
Allow simulation of dynamic processes
Solve the bridge problem between fuzzy associative hierarchiesandthediscretesymbolstringsofnatural language
3
EFTA01093001
Operations on these representations include reinforcement learning and classification, perceptual top-down/bottom-up processing,abstraction,analogy formation,associativeand syllogistic reasoning, planning, reflection, anticipation and severalmodesofreorganization.
Creating a scientific community
The Comprehension Challenge
ThetaskoftheStructureofMentalRepresentationinitiative will at first consistin thecreationofalargeandcompetitive community,builtaroundasetofbenchmarkproblems.
Isuggestpickingasetofproblemsthatcoversmostofthe abovearchitecturalrequirements:thecomprehensionof dynamic visual sequences (movies) and narratives. The evaluationofcomprehensionmayfocusbothonadiscourse level (asking the system general and specific questions about the consumed visuals or narratives) and directly, by producing dynamic renderings and depictions ofknowledge represented within the system. At least on the discourse level, a direct comparison to the functionalproperties ofchild performance at different cognitive stages is possible.
Turning the benchmark task into a regular competition allows a direct comparison between models, and offers a strong incentiveforexchangeofsolutionsamongresearchgroups.The need to for broad solutions with given material and intellectual resourceswillenforceahigherdegreeofthereuseofcodeand ideasthanwecurrentlyseeinAlarchitectures(outsideof robotic soccer, where such competitions have turned out to be highly successful).
By structuring the comprehension tasks into different levels and sub-domains (such as basic language acquisition tasks, grammar, perceptual and logical tasks, social reasoning/theory ofmind,affectiveevaluation,constructiveproblemsolving,use ofanalogiesandmetaphoretc.),wecanformulateconsistent long-term goals and realistic short-term problems.
The Formation of a Pilot Team
To pull the Structure ofMentalRepresentation initiative off the ground,wewillneedtocreateapilotteam,whichistheobject of this proposal.The pilot teamhas the following tasks:
-
- Bring acritically sized group of people together, with a well-defined set of shared goals
-
- FormulateaninitialsetofhypothesesBring these in the context of an existing or hypothetical cognitive architecture, so specifications can be derived
4
EFTA01093002
