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Loading... A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligenceby Jeff Hawkins
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  yates9 | Feb 28, 2024 |   The style is annoyingly condescending: short declarative sentences declaimed from way on high, telling you how it is, i,e., how Hawkins himself experienced his epochal moments of Deep Insight, how he's leading his team to answer all the Great Questions about the Mind, maybe not quite yet deliverable, but surely Just Around the Corner. Neuroscience researchers like Hawkins remind me of economists, except his optimism is not even "guarded." The Hard Problem of consciousness? It's not hard. It's not even a problem. Qualia? He glides over them in a paragraph or two, grudgingly admitting that not all can be programmed by quantitative means. Really? Jeff Hawkins (rhymes with Richard Dawkins (ha ha), who wrote the hyped up forward), is a man on a mission: self-aggrandizement (he's obsessed with the citations count on his technical papers) and mindshare, the kind that plays well at conventions. The book's tone is that of business and hypesterism. Like decades' worth of AI demonstration projects, his toy software brains will surely show "promising" results. But like all the predecessors, they will disappoint. The test environment he nurtures them with will be hollow and shallow. The output? Shrill, disappointing but ever "promising." A new theory of intelligence? Maybe. But if you read it, don't be taken in by the chutzpah in his confident tone. Be sure to ask some of the questions Hawkins religiously doesn't. (  ) Cr00 | Apr 1, 2023 | Another interesting section of the book talked about setting up a human legacy -- something to indicated to advanced civilizations in the universe to say that were we here. The underlying sentiment is that humans as a species are unlikely to last a million years. Avoiding a human induced extinction event like global warming or nuclear will be come increasingly difficult as time and technology advance. The discussion of "truth" memes was bit heavy-handed and was too political. (  ) Castinet | Dec 11, 2022 | ) Brown | Oct 31, 2022 | It may be a brilliant book but I couldn’t get through it so I never found out how brilliant it was. The author discusses a part of the brain called the neocortex which he maintains is the organ of intelligence. He refers to another book, apparently on the same subject, called The Mindful Brain which contains an essay by Vernon Mountcastle. However, since he says the essay is challenging to read (he should talk), I think I will give it a skip. I can’t say that I understood what I read in the present book. Perhaps I’ll try to read it in my next life, but again perhaps not. ( ) IonaS | Oct 13, 2022 | no reviews | add a review
"For all we hear of neuroscience's great advances, the field has generated more questions than answers. We know that the brain combines sensory input from all over your body into a single perception, but not how. We think brains "compute" in some sense, but we can't say what those computations are. We believe that the brain is organized as a hierarchy, with different pieces all working collaboratively to make a single model of the world. But we can explain neither how those pieces are differentiated, nor how they collaborate. Neuroscientist and computer engineer Jeff Hawkins argues that it's so hard to answer questions about the brain because our basic picture of how the brain works is wrong. In A Thousand Brains, Hawkins takes a radically new approach to the brain, with stunning implications. Hawkins' proposal, called the Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence, is that your brain is organized into thousands upon thousands of individually computing units, called cortical columns. These columns all process information from the outside world in the same way, and each builds a complete model of the world. But because every column has different connections to the rest of the body, each has a unique frame of reference. Your brain sorts out all those models by conducting a vote. The fundamental job of the brain, therefore, is not to build a single thought, but to manage the thousands of individual thoughts it has every moment. With this powerful new framework, Hawkins is able to reassess some of neuroscience's most stubborn problems, like why pain needs to be painful to be useful, how we can understand that our perspective of a thing changes as we move around it, and why we might be conscious but individual pieces of our body aren't. And once you understand how the brain works, it is a lot easier to make one yourself. Hawkins is, above all, an engineer, and A Thousand Brains outlines how a new understanding of intelligence could lead to truly intelligent AI. Hawkins explores how we might create machines that can learn on their own, why we need not fear superintelligent systems, and how human and machine intelligence may someday merge. Combining cutting-edge theoretical neuroscience with an ambitious program for tomorrow's digital minds, A Thousand Brains heralds a revolution in the study of intelligence. It is a big-think book, in every sense of the word"-- No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)612.8Technology Medicine and health Human physiology Nervous systemLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.86)
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Wikipedia in English
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The book follows with discussions about existential risk of AI that are insightful, however they miss a context of others that research this area so they are not complete.
If the author had submitted his ideas about existential risk to other philosophers and risk experts i think he would have discovered that his view, while insightful, is missing the broader context.
Nevertheless this is a must read, even as ideas to disagree with. (