From Computation to Consciousness: How computation helps to explain mind, universe and everything

How can the physical universe give rise to a mind?
I suggest to replace this confusing question by another one: what kind of information processing system is the mind, and how is the mind computed? As we will see, even our ideas of the physical universe turn out to be computational. Let us explore some fascinating scenery of the philosophy underlying Artificial Intelligence.

The Chaos Communication Congress Talks

In 2013, I attended the 30c3 to deliver a lecture on how to build an Artificial Intelligence to an audience of hackers. The Chaos Communication Congress is a fascinating venue, because it combines very smart and curious attendants with an opportunity to present ideas in a format that is unconstrained by our usual academic habits. It was so not only a lot of fun, but also helpful to express a lot of ideas that I would not have fixated anywhere else, and so I continued to produce presentations in the following years.

The xxC3 talks are attempts at answering the questions of the me that entered academia to learn about what minds are, and how they relate to the world. I still have these questions, but I have dug a few tunnels into the bedrock of my ignorance over the years, and I would like to show you where they have led me.