Monday, August 22, 2005
Amazon.com: Books: On Intelligence
The premise of this book is that the brain barely does any computing at all, it just looks things up in its huge memory. Oh yes, and it also predicts, but only one step ahead. What's meant by prediction is that the brain knows where it is inside of any number of sequences, which span all scales in distance, time, and logical hierarchy, and expects the next item in the sequence by preemptively firing a group of cells. Each group of cells thus logically represents a "name" for an item in the sequence. This behavior is assumed to be the same for vision, hearing, touch, proprioception, and language (yes, language).
But wait, more simplifications are on the way. The cortex has a uniform structure, so Hawkins conjectures that it starts as a blank slate, acquiring all of its features simply by analyzing sensory data. This is where Hawkins runs into trouble, in my opinion. He seems to be woefully ignorant of language. If the cortex started out blank and simply feature-detected its way to general intelligence, we would expect to find a more randomized distribution of various cortical modules. In particular, there would no reason to expect someone to be able to construct complicated, recursive sentences by the age of five; it would be a high school subject, like algebra and programming. We would also expect people to handle center-embedded sentences with the same ease as right-branched sentences.
onintelligence.org forums attract crackpots, but what did Hawkins expect, preaching revolutionary ideas about how general intelligence to the uneducated public?
"When you see, feel, or hear something, the cortex takes the detailed, highly specific input and converts it to an invariant form. It is the invariant form that is stored in memory." Great, forming invariant representations is only the biggest question in vision.
"The next higher region recognizes sequences of phonemes to create words. The next higher region recognizes sequences of words to create phrases, and so on." -- You really have to demonstrate a mechanism for generating phrases and reconcile it with existing knowledge about language on planet Earth. Dismissing all of linguistics with "create phrases, and so on" exposes a profound ignorance of what language really is.
"Consciousness is what it feels like to have a cortex" -- How blase
The premise of this book is that the brain barely does any computing at all, it just looks things up in its huge memory. Oh yes, and it also predicts, but only one step ahead. What's meant by prediction is that the brain knows where it is inside of any number of sequences, which span all scales in distance, time, and logical hierarchy, and expects the next item in the sequence by preemptively firing a group of cells. Each group of cells thus logically represents a "name" for an item in the sequence. This behavior is assumed to be the same for vision, hearing, touch, proprioception, and language (yes, language).
But wait, more simplifications are on the way. The cortex has a uniform structure, so Hawkins conjectures that it starts as a blank slate, acquiring all of its features simply by analyzing sensory data. This is where Hawkins runs into trouble, in my opinion. He seems to be woefully ignorant of language. If the cortex started out blank and simply feature-detected its way to general intelligence, we would expect to find a more randomized distribution of various cortical modules. In particular, there would no reason to expect someone to be able to construct complicated, recursive sentences by the age of five; it would be a high school subject, like algebra and programming. We would also expect people to handle center-embedded sentences with the same ease as right-branched sentences.
onintelligence.org forums attract crackpots, but what did Hawkins expect, preaching revolutionary ideas about how general intelligence to the uneducated public?
"When you see, feel, or hear something, the cortex takes the detailed, highly specific input and converts it to an invariant form. It is the invariant form that is stored in memory." Great, forming invariant representations is only the biggest question in vision.
"The next higher region recognizes sequences of phonemes to create words. The next higher region recognizes sequences of words to create phrases, and so on." -- You really have to demonstrate a mechanism for generating phrases and reconcile it with existing knowledge about language on planet Earth. Dismissing all of linguistics with "create phrases, and so on" exposes a profound ignorance of what language really is.
"Consciousness is what it feels like to have a cortex" -- How blase
# posted by Notetaker @ 12:20 PM 
