Synthetic Intelligence Architecture

Synthetic intelligence is Joscha Bach’s term for intelligence understood through construction—not artificial (imitation of the natural) and not natural (description of the biological) but synthesized from first principles precise enough to implement. The program, developed in his 2009 book Principles of Synthetic Intelligence and embodied in the MicroPsi cognitive architecture he directed between 2002 and 2007, begins with a question the dominant paradigm of contemporary AI consistently skips: what does a mind have to do? Not what can it be trained to predict, but what functions must any genuine cognitive system perform in order to survive as an agent in an uncertain world? Bach’s answer integrates components that AI development has treated as separable: motivation (the structure of needs and drives), emotion (global modulation of the whole system in response to need-states), perception (active construction of a structured world-model), memory (preservation and reorganization of representations over time), and a self-model (the system’s representation of itself as the agent doing all