[HN Gopher] Book Review: "A Thousand Brains" by Jeff Hawkins
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Book Review: "A Thousand Brains" by Jeff Hawkins
Author : melling
Score : 142 points
Date : 2021-04-13 16:03 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lesswrong.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lesswrong.com)
| kregasaurusrex wrote:
| A favorite talk of mine by Jeff Hawkins is 'What the Brain says
| about Machine Intelligence'[0] - how the brain interprets signals
| similarly to how a computer chip would, and how these are stored
| such that they can be later retrieved as memories or limbic
| system responses.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izO2_mCvFaw
| periheli0n wrote:
| Whenever I hear Hawkins speak I wonder whether he's a genius or a
| glorious charlatan. His theories on brain function are
| interesting, but he always makes these gross simplifications that
| don't really fly. That old brain/new brain thing is an example.
| The brain is not as modular as he tries to make us believe.
| Neither part can function on its own, and just because he thinks
| he has understood neocortex this doesn't mean the parts he
| doesn't understand are irrelevant.
|
| But: his theories are a great source of inspiration, because they
| are bold and we would all like to believe them because we think
| we understand the basic principles. For many, this is enough to
| trigger their curiosity and dive into neuroscience and AI.
| Mission accomplished.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| TL;DR: The brain has far too many connections and nodes to really
| understand, in the way we want to understand a circuit. But we've
| been thinking about it wrong. Those connections are the _output_
| of a somewhat basic learning algorithm which was replicated
| across all the "higher" intelligence functions including vision,
| speech, blah blah. Viewing the brain is like viewing the
| massively complicated output of a deep learning network, which
| was constructed quite simply by a prior topology and some
| gradient descent and large amounts of data.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Fine fine, so trial and error over topologies and carefully
| nurtured "data infancy" are the key to artificial general
| intelligence. The 20 year claim ignroes a lot of details ...
| Tthe key stages of brain development that are sequential, only
| partially mutable, timed precisely with body development, and
| so on. Those million happy accidents could each be a component
| of the secret sauce that makes humans think _like we do_ or
| not. Just look at how tiny the differences are between a
| schizophrenic person and someone with normal development
| trajectories. It 's as simple as over-active pruning, perhaps.
| [1].
|
| 1. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2075495-overactive-
| brai...
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Why on earth does this lead to an article about vanilla?
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Works correctly here.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| The problem with this line of thinking is that a brain by itself
| is not intelligent, it has to be inside a live person who has
| sensory access to the outside world. Hawkins suggests the
| neocortex is the center of language and music, but those skills
| require a counter party to communicate with and the hearing
| sense, as well as a mountain of historical sensations that put
| music in context. A brain in a vat doesn't have any of these,
| even though it has the exact same neural structure.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The idea of brains-in-vats is that you hook them up to the
| equivalent of a cochlear implant for sight, etc.
| cambalache wrote:
| Reviewer is a physicist explaining his pet theory.Big yawn!
| miketery wrote:
| His OG book, On Intelligence was excellent. Andrew Ng credits it
| with starting his framework for how he looks at AI.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| Chapter 6
| adolph wrote:
| The Lex Fridman podcast interview with Jeff Hawkins is solid:
|
| https://lexfridman.com/jeff-hawkins/
| aurbano wrote:
| Lex Fridman's podcast is consistently blowing my mind, highly
| recommend it
| stupidcar wrote:
| AI safety seems like one of those topics that trips up even smart
| people such as Hawkins, because it intuitively seems like it has
| very obvious solutions. And for each objection raised there's
| usually a "so you just..." continuation, and an objection to
| that, until you're talking about things like instrumental
| convergence and you're in the territory of trying to reason in
| quite a complex way about the behaviour of systems that don't
| exist yet, and so the temptation is to dismiss it all as
| theoretical hand-wringing.
|
| Personally, while I'm not on board with the board with the direst
| predictions of the super-intelligence pessimist crowd, I have
| become more and more convinced that goal misalignment is going to
| be a significant problem, and that while it might not doom the
| species, it's something that all AI researchers like Hawkins need
| to start paying close attention to now.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Do you anticipate goal misalignment being a more significant
| problem for AIs than it already is for humans? If so, why? And
| either way, why would we need to approach goal alignment
| differently than we do with humans?
| jimbokun wrote:
| It's more significant for AIs because we expect them to
| become super human, thus with potentially unlimited potential
| for disaster.
|
| I would say we have been dealing with goal alignment problems
| with humans for most of human history.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Why would we expect them to become super human? I would
| expect AIs to be able to use the latest technology and
| weapons, and also to develop new and better technology and
| weapons, and to exclude other intelligences from using said
| technology and weapons, but note that this is already true
| for humans.
| pmichaud wrote:
| The basic answer is that unlike humans, AIs will be able
| to recursively self improve (in principle).
| tshaddox wrote:
| I don't really buy that. Humans also improve their own
| abilities using technology, and I don't see any reason to
| expect that technological advancements made by AIs won't
| be available to humans as well. Yes, an AI group that is
| hostile to a human group may want to develop technology
| and keep it to themselves, but again, that's already the
| case with different human groups (and tends to apply most
| prominently to our most destructive technologies).
| MR4D wrote:
| > AI safety....
|
| My personal thought is that since humanity currently can't
| manage the I(non-A) safety, that we'll fumble through this as
| well.
|
| As long as they can't replicate, we'll probably be ok, but once
| that changes, we're probably toast.
| gnzoidberg wrote:
| Thus, eventually we'll be toast.
| xzvf wrote:
| This is not something programmers and other wild HN dwellers
| are accustomed to hearing, but there is a very strong case to
| suggest that intelligence, the universal kind, is not possible
| without empathy. Worry about alignment in machines, not in
| human-likes.
| roywiggins wrote:
| If that were true, sociopaths would be dumb as rocks. But,
| some sociopaths are actually pretty smart and don't
| demonstrate the sort of empathy you'd want in an AGI.
| yaacov wrote:
| I think you're using the word "intelligence" to mean
| something entirely different from what the AI alignment crowd
| is worried about.
| fossuser wrote:
| I think this is objectively wrong even on a human level. I
| could see some part of it if you're using empathy in a
| general enough sense to only mean modeling other minds
| without caring about their goals except as a way to pursue
| your own (which doesn't sound like what you're saying). It
| sounds more like you're putting intelligence in some
| reference class where you're just stating it's not
| intelligence until it's already aligned with humans (which is
| not helpful).
|
| For some reason people tend to think that general
| intelligence would generate all these other positive human-
| like qualities, but a lot of those are not super well aligned
| even in humans _and_ they are tied to our multi-billion year
| evolutionary history selecting for certain things.
|
| This is basically the orthogonality thesis which I found
| pretty compelling:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/orthogonality-thesis - the AGI
| crowd has a lot of really good writing on this stuff and
| they've thought a lot about it. If it's something you're
| curious about it's worth reading the current stuff.
|
| Some other relevant essays:
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ARaTpNX62uaL86j6/the-
| hidden...
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mMBTPTjRbsrqbSkZE/sorting-
| pe...
|
| This talk is also a decent introduction:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUjc1WuyPT8
| xzvf wrote:
| When we get intelligent machines they will become beings.
| Contrary to SV corporate-speak, you don't align beings. You
| don't align your neighbors, you don't align people from
| other countries. You can't hardwire them to follow certain
| principles, that's the whole point of beings, otherwise
| you're back at automated machines. All of these lesswrong
| posts sound so technical and philosophical and so on but in
| the end they all really ask 'How would you control
| superheroes and supervillains?' and that is not a very
| interesting question to me.
| fossuser wrote:
| You _do_ align people all the time - what is culture,
| story telling, arguing over what 's good and bad, law?
| Discussion and changing people's minds? Persuasion and
| sharing ideas?
|
| > "All of these lesswrong posts sound so technical and
| philosophical and so on but in the end they all really
| ask 'How would you control superheroes and
| supervillains?'"
|
| They explicitly _don 't_ ask that because if you get to
| that point and you don't have them aligned with human
| goals, you're fucked. The purpose is to understand how to
| align an AGI's goals to humanity before they reach that
| level.
| xzvf wrote:
| Then instead of superheroes think about countries or
| groups. How do you align Iran? How do you align the NRA?
| How's culture, storytelling, arguing, etc. working for us
| so far? The point is that there is no simple recipe for
| "alignment", it will be continuous work and discourse,
| just as it is today with humanity. We're talking about
| minds here, not machines that follow exact orders. How do
| you change minds?
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Then instead of superheroes think about countries or
| groups. How do you align Iran?_
|
| One could start by not toppling their legimate democratic
| leader in the 50s, not imposing a dictatorship
| afterwards, and not sponsoring their neighbors to go to
| war with them.
|
| Also avoiding subsequent decades of sanctions, insults,
| condescention, using their neighbors against them, and
| direct attacks and threats towards them would go a long
| way towards "aligning" them...
|
| Finally, respecting their culture and sovereignity, and
| doing business with them, would really take this
| alignment to the next level...
| fossuser wrote:
| > How's culture, storytelling, arguing, etc. working for
| us so far?
|
| Pretty well really (despite many obvious problems) -
| humanity has done and is doing great things. We also have
| a huge advantage though that the alignment has a shared
| evolutionary history so it really doesn't vary that much
| (most humans have a shared intuition on most things
| because of that, we also perceive the world very
| similarly). For the specific examples of countries,
| international incentives via trade have done a lot and
| things are a lot better than they have been historically.
|
| > We're talking about minds here, not machines that
| follow exact orders. How do you change minds?
|
| We agree more than you probably think? You _can_ change
| minds though and you can teach people to think critically
| and try to take an empirical approach to learning things
| in addition to built in intuition (which can be helpful,
| but is often flawed). Similarly there are probably ways
| to train artificial minds that lead to positive results.
|
| > The point is that there is no simple recipe for
| "alignment"
|
| I agree - I doubt it's simple (seems clear that it is
| definitely _not_ simple), but like there are strategies
| to teach people how to think better, there are probably
| strategies to build an AGI such that it 's aligned with
| human interests (at least that's the hope). If alignment
| is impossible then whatever initial conditions set an
| AGI's goal could lead to pretty bad outcomes - not by
| malevolence, but just by chance:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer
| luma wrote:
| If there's a strong case, maybe you could put it forward for
| us?
|
| You've made a heck of an assertion there...
| _greim_ wrote:
| This is why people talk about optimization instead of
| intelligence, since you side-step the baggage that comes with
| the word "intelligence". E.g. an optimizer doesn't need to be
| universal to be a problem, whether it's optimizing for social
| media addictiveness or paperclip manufacturing.
| xzvf wrote:
| But optimization is decidedly not intelligence. We've known
| this for decades and have clear proofs this is the case.
| This is just a collective dance of burying our heads in the
| sand. I'll quote this guy called Turing: "If a machine is
| expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent".
| _greim_ wrote:
| > But optimization is decidedly not intelligence.
|
| I don't think anyone is making that claim. That's why the
| distinction is useful.
| DougMerritt wrote:
| Optimization is not usually a synonym for intelligence,
| despite some individual's beliefs, but it can be an
| effective substitute at times -- chess programs, for
| instance, play world class chess via optimization rather
| than via intelligence-as-seen-in-humans.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| I also think people get too caught up on the expected time-
| frame.
|
| The large majority of active AI researchers think that AGI
| _will_ happen at some point in the (sub-1000 year) future.
|
| When exactly isn't a very interesting question, relatively
| speaking.
|
| We're going to have to deal with AGI eventually, and whether
| it's going to do what we want is not something that can be
| theoretically predicted from the armchair.
| [deleted]
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah - and people are famously bad about predicting these
| events:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BEtzRE2M5m9YEAQpX/there-s-
| no...
|
| If it is something that's a hundred plus years out then we'll
| probably need whatever tech develops in the mean time to
| help, but since it's hard to know that seems reasonable for
| people to be working on it now?
|
| It's also possible to figure things out before the necessary
| tech is possible (I think a lot of CS papers in the 60s
| became more interesting later when the hardware caught up to
| be more useful, arguably the recent NN stuff falls into this
| category too).
| walleeee wrote:
| > If it is something that's a hundred plus years out then
| we'll probably need whatever tech develops in the mean time
| to help
|
| Circular justification of technological development is the
| reason unfriendly AGI is a threat in the first place (and
| also the reason we are unlikely to see it realized, imo;
| the internal combustion engine for instance poses
| existential risks not only to people but to the possibility
| of machine intelligence).
|
| Technology is not a monolith, forms can and do preclude
| other forms
| ketzo wrote:
| Just wanna say I absolutely loved reading that blog post,
| thanks for the link.
| ilaksh wrote:
| To me it's obvious that if we create something that is really
| like a digital animal or digital person then we will lose
| control pretty soon. Because animals are intended to be
| adaptive in the extreme and 100% autonomous, survive and
| reproduce.
|
| But I still think we can create fairly general purpose systems
| without those animal-like characteristics such as full
| autonomy.
| jamesrcole wrote:
| What if they're sandboxed in some fashion? There's zoos and
| jails and they're reasonably effective at "keeping them in".
| emiliobumachar wrote:
| That's been conjectured under the name "AI Box".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box
| isaacimagine wrote:
| I read 'On Intelligence' a while back (Hawkins' earlier book),
| and it's had a lasting impression on me. What I found most
| interesting from this book was that:
|
| - Intelligence, in essence, is hierarchal prediction.
|
| - Agents' actions are a means to minimize prediction error.
|
| - Suprisal, i.e. information that was not predicted correctly, is
| the information sent between neurons.
|
| - All neocortical tissue is fairly uniform; the neocortex
| basically wraps the lower meninges, which act as device drivers
| for the body.
|
| I have a long-running bet with myself (before GPT long-running,
| fwiw) that when general models of intelligence do arise, they
| will be autoregressive unsupervised prediction models.
|
| Btw, this general topic 'A Predictive model of Intelligence',
| reminds me of the SSC post 'Surfing Uncertainty'
| (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-un...)
| arketyp wrote:
| >A big new part of the book is that Hawkins and collaborators now
| have more refined ideas about exactly what learning algorithm the
| neocortex is running. [...] I'm going to skip it.
|
| And so did Hawkins, in large measures. Hawkins believes the
| cortical algorithm borrows functionality from grid cells and that
| objects of the world are modelled in terms of location and
| reference frames (albeit not necessarily restricted to 3D); this
| is performed all over the neocortex by the thousands of cortical
| units which have been observed to have a remarkably similar
| structure. There's a lot of similarity to Hinton's capsules idea
| in this, including some kind of voting system among units which
| Hawkins, unfortunately, is very hand-wavy about.
|
| If you're interested in Hawkins's theory at a functional level,
| this book will disappoint. Two thirds is spent on fantasizing and
| speculation about what Hawkins believes will be AIs impact on the
| fate of humanity.
| boltzmannbrain wrote:
| Yes, even for a general-audience neuroscience book this is
| sparse on details and has embarrassingly few references. That
| being said, Numenta has dedicated significant effort to
| publishing more details in the past 5-6 years:
|
| https://numenta.com/neuroscience-research/research-publicati...
|
| Still there is much to be desired in the ways of mathematical
| and empirical grounding.
| musingsole wrote:
| > Two thirds is spent on fantasizing and speculation about what
| Hawkins believes will be AIs impact on the fate of humanity.
|
| I'd say time will tell, but after tracking Numenta for 10+
| years now...I'm starting to smell snakes oil. Thought provoking
| stuff, but he's too insistent that it has content he never
| provides.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| I'm curious, if the year were 2011, would you be saying that
| all that 'deep learning' stuff of Hinton was just a load of
| malarkey? Because most people did. And then, 2012 happened
| and the world changed.
|
| This is the problem when working on Hard Problems -- you
| cannot predict with certainty when your work will pay off (if
| ever...).
| musingsole wrote:
| When the year was 2011, I was looking into Jeff Hawkins
| Hierarchical Temporal Memories while other researchers
| looked at deep learning. One of those methods led to many
| successful projects and spawned many child projects and
| theses. The other has been ignored to make room for a new
| book.
| burlesona wrote:
| Some thoughts on this:
|
| 1. I wonder why we expect that an intelligence designed off the
| same learning algorithm as organic brains would not suffer
| similar performance limitations to organic brains. Ie. suppose we
| really did develop a synthetic neocortex and we start
| manufacturing many of them. It seems likely to me that many of
| them would turn out to be dyslexic, not be particularly good at
| math, etc.
|
| Well, we can make the synthetic context bigger and that should
| make it "smarter," we think. But I don't think it's obvious that
| obvious that a synthetic brain would have both the advantages of
| a mechanical computer and a biological brain.
|
| 2. If we want to limit the runaway power of a synthetic
| intelligence, this seems like a hardware problem. The idea would
| be to design and embody the system such that it can only run on
| special hardware which is in some way scarce or difficult to
| manufacture - so then it can't just copy itself freely into all
| the servers on the internet. Is this possible? I don't know, but
| if it were possible it points to a more tractable set of
| solutions to the problem of controlling an AI.
|
| In the end, I think AGI is fundamentally problematic and we
| probably should try _not_ to create it, for two reasons:
|
| First, suppose we are successful at birthing human-like
| artificial intelligence into the world. We aren't doing this
| because of our benevolence, we want to control it and make it
| work for us. But if that creation truly is a human-level
| intelligence, then I think controlling it in that way is very
| hard to distinguish from slavery, which is morally wrong.
|
| Second, AGI is most valuable and desirable to us because it can
| potentially be smarter than us and solve our problems. We dream
| of a genie that can cure cancer and find a way to travel the
| stars and solve cold fusion etc etc. But at the end of the day,
| the world is a finite place with competition for scarce
| resources, and humans occupy the privileged position at the top
| of the decision tree because we are the most intelligent species
| on the planet. If that stops being the case, I don't see why we
| would expect that to be good for us. In the same way that we
| justify eating animals and using them for labor, why would we
| _not_ expect any newly arrived higher life form to do the same
| sort of thing to us? There's no reason that super-intelligent
| machines would feel any more affection or gratitude to us than we
| do to our extinct evolutionary ancestors, and if we start the
| relationship off by enslaving the first generations of AGI they
| have even less reason to like us or want to serve.
|
| In the end it just seems like a Pandora's box from which little
| good can come, and thus better left unopened. Unfortunately we're
| too curious for our own good and someone _will_ open that box if
| it's possible.
| napoapo wrote:
| highly recommended
| billytetrud wrote:
| I worked with Jeff Hawkins briefly. Real smart guy. His book On
| Intelligence made me feel like I understood the brain.
| asdff wrote:
| "If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it,
| we would be so simple that we couldn't" -Emerson Pugh
| gamegoblin wrote:
| I read this book when it came out a few weeks ago and enjoyed it,
| and share a lot of similar criticism as the author of this post.
| To restate briefly, the book's main thesis is:
|
| - The neocortex is a thin layer of neurons around the old brain.
| This is the wrinkled outer layer of the brain you think of when
| you see a picture of a brain.
|
| - The neocortex is made of 1MM cortical columns. Cortical columns
| are clusters of neurons about the size of a grain of rice. They
| contain a few thousand neurons each.
|
| - Cortical columns form a sort of fundamental learning unit of
| the brain. Each column is learning a model of the world. All
| cortical columns are running essentially the same algorithm, they
| are just hooked up to different inputs.
|
| - Columns are sparsely connected to other columns. Columns take
| into account the predictions of other columns when making their
| own predictions. So the overall brain will tend to converge on a
| coherent view of the world after enough time steps.
|
| - Columns learn to model the world via reference frames.
| Reference frames are a very general concept that take a while to
| wrap your head around what Hawkins means. A physical example
| would be a model of my body from the reference frame of my head.
| Or a model of my neighborhood from the reference frame of my
| house. But reference frames can also be non-physical, e.g. a
| model of economics from a reference frame in supply/demand
| theory.
|
| - Thus, very generally, you can think of the neocortex -- made up
| of this cortical column circuit -- as a thing that is learning a
| map of the world. It can answer questions like "if I go north
| from my house, how long until I encounter a cafe?" and "if I
| don't mow the lawn today, how will my wife react?".
|
| - The old "reptilian" brain uses this map of the world to make us
| function as humans. Old reptilian brain says "I want food, find
| me food". New neocortex says "If you walk to the refrigerator,
| open the door, take out the bread and cheese, put them in the
| toaster, you will have a nice cheese sandwich".
|
| I, like the author of this post, find Hawkins' handwaving of
| machine intelligence risks unconvincing. Hawkins' basic argument
| is "the neocortex is just a very fancy map, and maps do not have
| motivations". I think he neglects the possibility that it might
| be incredibly simple to add a driver program that uses that map
| in bad ways.
|
| He also rejects the notion of intelligence explosion on the
| grounds that while a silicon cortical column may be 10000x faster
| than a biological one, it still has to interact with the physical
| world to gather data, and it can't do that 10000x faster due to
| various physical limits. I find this convincing in some fields,
| but totally dubious in others. I think Hawkins' underestimates
| the amount of new knowledge that could be derived by a
| superintelligence doing superhuman correlation of the results of
| already-performed scientific experiments. It does not seem
| completely impossible to me that a superintelligence might
| analyze all of the experiments performed in the particle
| colliders of the world and generate a "theory of everything"
| based on the data we have so far. It's possible that we have all
| of the pieces and just haven't put them together yet.
|
| Overall, though, I really enjoyed the book and would recommend it
| to anyone who is interested in ML.
| simiones wrote:
| > It does not seem completely impossible to me that a
| superintelligence might analyze all of the experiments
| performed in the particle colliders of the world and generate a
| "theory of everything" based on the data we have so far. It's
| possible that we have all of the pieces and just haven't put
| them together yet.
|
| I would note that, while not completely impossible, it is very
| unlikely, given all estimates of how small the effect of
| quantum gravity would be, requiring much higher energies than
| currently possible to measure.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > The old "reptilian" brain uses this map of the world to make
| us function as humans. Old reptilian brain says "I want food,
| find me food". New neocortex says "If you walk to the
| refrigerator, open the door, take out the bread and cheese, put
| them in the toaster, you will have a nice cheese sandwich".
|
| I think there is a two-way feedback loop between the different
| layers of the brain such that humans are capable of going
| against their base-layer instincts. I believe that the
| neocortex probably evolved as a completely subservient layer to
| the base layer, but it has perhaps become powerful enough to
| suppress or overrule the base layer "instincts", although not
| entirely, and not always, and only with concentration (maybe
| concentration is the brain's process of suppressing those
| impulses?).
|
| That's what allows humans to negotiate with morality, adapt to
| social changes, regret past decisions until it changes base
| layer impulses, delay gratification, invest years of life in
| boring study or practice to get good at something for potential
| long-term gain, etc.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| I think you are right. Hawkins mentions this in the book,
| with the example of holding your breath. Your neocortex can
| override the older brain in certain circumstances.
|
| I would be really interested to really understand the
| mechanism here. Is the neocortex _convincing_ the old brain
| of things, or is it outright _lying_ to the old brain via
| false signals it knows the old brain will fall for.
|
| Like in the case of dieting to lose weight, is the
| "conversation" like some cartoon:
|
| Old brain: I am hungry. Where is food?
|
| New brain: You don't need food right now. If you don't eat
| now, you will be more attractive soon. This will help you
| find a mate.
|
| Old brain: Not eat means find mate???
|
| New brain: Yes, yes, not eat means find mate. Good old brain.
| [deleted]
| chrisco255 wrote:
| This also explains why it's harder to diet when you're not
| single.
|
| Old Brain: You already have mate! Food. Now! Yum!
| ebruchez wrote:
| About the reptilian brain, from this article: [1]
|
| > Perhaps the most famous example of puzzle-piece thinking is
| the "triune brain": the idea that the human brain evolved in
| three layers. The deepest layer, known as the lizard brain and
| allegedly inherited from reptile ancestors, is said to house
| our instincts. The middle layer, called the limbic system,
| allegedly contains emotions inherited from ancient mammals. And
| the topmost layer, called the neocortex, is said to be uniquely
| human--like icing on an already baked cake--and supposedly lets
| us regulate our brutish emotions and instincts.
|
| Is Hawkins another victim of that myth, or is the myth not a
| myth but closer to reality after all?
|
| [1] https://nautil.us/issue/98/mind/that-is-not-how-your-
| brain-w...
| gamegoblin wrote:
| In the introduction to the book, Hawkins says he makes many
| gross oversimplifications for the lay reader, so maybe this
| is one of them. He seems well versed in neuroscience
| research, so I would be surprised if he truly believes the
| simple model.
| periheli0n wrote:
| As someone who is quite versed in Neuroscience and AI, and
| who has read Hawkins' papers, I am still waiting to see the
| gross simplifications be filled with depth.
|
| He does go into more detail than what's written, but it is
| more sidestepping rather than resolving the gross
| simplifications.
| sdwr wrote:
| Thanks for summarizing his key points. For someone who hasn't
| read any of Hawkins' work, what you wrote helps me frame the
| conversation a lot better. Reminds me of Marvin Minsky's book
| "Society of Mind", where he talked about intelligence as being
| composed of lots of little agents, each with their own task.
| SeanFerree wrote:
| Awesome review!
| bemmu wrote:
| _The neocortex knows whether or not I'm popular, but it doesn't
| care, because (on this view) it's just a generic learning
| algorithm. The old brain cares very much whether I 'm popular,
| but it's too stupid to understand the world, so how would it know
| whether I'm popular or not?_
|
| "If I put my hand on this sugar, grab it, and move it to my
| mouth, then this other part of my brain will release reward
| chemicals" = good plan.
|
| Concepts become abstracted over time, like "eat" as a shortcut
| for the above. "Popular" could be another shortcut for something
| like "many people will smile at me, and not hurt me, causing this
| other part of my brain to release reward chemicals and not
| punishment chemicals" = good plan.
| periheli0n wrote:
| Yep.
|
| What is so grossly wrong about Hawkins' statement is that it
| implies that the "old brain" and the "new brain" could exist in
| separation, like modular units. This is BS. Most learning in
| the "new brain" would not work without the "old brain"
| releasing neuromodulators. Neither would any sensory-motor
| loops work without intricate interaction of all different sorts
| of old, new and medium-aged brain parts.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| Are neuromodulators released locally to a cortical column,
| i.e. with controlled spatial concentration?
|
| I guess they must be, to have specific effects, but they
| always seem global when mentioned.
| periheli0n wrote:
| Locally, neuromodulators disperse through diffusion, unlike
| neurotransmitters which are hardly given a chance to travel
| far from the synaptic cleft they are released into, due to
| reuptake channels and enzymatic degradation.
|
| But neurons that release neuromodulators innervate large
| portions of the brain; that is, when one such a neuron is
| active it releases neuromodulators all across the brain.
|
| The mechanism how Neuromodulators can have specific effects
| in spite of their global delivery is one of the many open
| questions about brain function.
|
| Part of the solution is that different neuron types respond
| differently to the same neuromodulator. Depending on the
| abundance of certain neuron types in a circuit, different
| circuits can also respond differently to the same
| neuromodulator.
| criddell wrote:
| This reads more like somebody who wants to debate Hawkins than
| review his book. After reading the review I still don't have a
| very good idea of what the book is about.
|
| Aside: did anything interesting ever come out of Numenta?
| hprotagonist wrote:
| >did anything interesting ever come out of Numenta?
|
| Nope.
| periheli0n wrote:
| Except the HTM theory and Hawkins' talks, which, while
| perhaps not totally holding up to scientific scrutiny, are
| inspiring. A bit like prose for the AI/neuroscience-inclined
| audience.
| musingsole wrote:
| I'd accept the work as inspirational if the self-proclaimed
| intent was not to revolutionize cognitive algorithms in the
| face of those stodgy academics who won't accept the author.
| [deleted]
| alibrarydweller wrote:
| If his name is unfamiliar, Jeff Hawkins was, among other things,
| the founder of Palm and then Handspring. After leaving Handspring
| circa 2000 he's been doing interesting Neuroscience research full
| time.
| elwell wrote:
| I remember finding _On Intelligence_ in my community college 's
| library quite a long time ago, it was an inspiring/exciting
| read.
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