From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Thu Oct 20 2005 - 05:54:30 MDT
Hi Matt (and others)
I posted my review of Hawkins' book a while ago
http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2004/OnBiologicalAndDigitalIntelligence.htm
and some follow-up comments here
http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2004/ProbabilisticVisionProcessing.htm
-- Ben
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-sl4@sl4.org [mailto:owner-sl4@sl4.org]On Behalf Of
> sl4ghu@mattbamberger.com
> Sent: Thursday, October 20, 2005 2:23 AM
> To: sl4@sl4.org
> Subject: RE: Jeff Hawkins' theory of cognition?
>
>
> His ideas are well-done and useful (which doesn't mean that they are
> correct, of course).
>
> His book On Intelligence is well worth reading. Here's my 30 second
> summary:
>
> - The cool part of human intelligence happens in the neocortex.
> - The neocortex is all uniform: every module is functionally equivalent to
> every other.
> - The purpose of the neocortex is to do pattern matching.
> - Intelligence happens when you stack many pattern matchers together in a
> hierarchy.
>
> Further details that he considers important are that information travels
> down the hierarchy as much as up, that time is an important player in the
> system, and that prediction is a very important role of the pattern
> matchers.
>
> Jeff recently started a company (Numenta, not to be confused with
> Novamente
> :-) to build the core technology that he believes is involved.
> They demoed
> at AC2005, but didn't really have enough built to allow one to make an
> informed judgment about how they're doing.
>
> My personal read is that Jeff's a super-smart guy with talent,
> ambition, and
> money, as well as some good ideas. I get the sense (possibly
> unfairly) that
> he's a little simplistic in his approach: to my mind, he comes across as
> somewhat dogmatic that almost everything interesting is the result of this
> single absolutely invariant module.
>
> I've recently started work on a visual system which is in many
> ways similar
> to Numenta's, although I'm inclined to stray further from biological
> faithfulness than they seem to be. I'll probably have a more informed
> opinion about how useful the approach is in a few months...
>
> -mattb
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-sl4@sl4.org [mailto:owner-sl4@sl4.org] On Behalf Of
> Chris Capel
> Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2005 4:56 PM
> To: sl4@sl4.org
> Subject: Jeff Hawkins' theory of cognition?
>
> http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/10/wo/wo_101305hawkins.asp
>
> thru kurzweilai.net
>
> Does anyone know if his ideas are well-done and useful?
>
> Chris Capel
> --
> "What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
> like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
> -- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)
>
>
>
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