On Intelligence
Posted by admin | Posted in Neurology | Posted on 23-08-2010
5
Product Description
From the inventor of the PalmPilot comes a new and compelling theory of intelligence, brain function, and the future of intelligent machines
Jeff Hawkins, the man who created the PalmPilot, Treo smart phone, and other handheld devices, has reshaped our relationship to computers. Now he stands ready to revolutionize both neuroscience and computing in one stroke, with a new understanding of intelligence itself.
Hawkins develops a powerful theory of how the human brain works, explaining why computers are not intelligent and how, based on this new theory, we can finally build intelligent machines.
The brain is not a computer, but a memory system that stores experiences in a way that reflects the true structure of the world, remembering sequences of events and their nested relationships and making predictions based on those memories. It is this memory-prediction system that forms the basis of intelligence, perception, creativity, and even consciousness.
In an engaging style that will captivate audiences from the merely curious to the professional scientist, Hawkins shows how a clear understanding of how the brain works will make it possible for us to build intelligent machines, in silicon, that will exceed our human ability in surprising ways.
Written with acclaimed science writer Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence promises to completely transfigure the possibilities of the technology age. It is a landmark book in its scope and clarity.
Amazon.com Review
Jeff Hawkins, the high-tech success story behind PalmPilots and the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, does a lot of thinking about thinking. In On Intelligence Hawkins juxtaposes his two loves–computers and brains–to examine the real future of artificial intelligence. In doing so, he unites two fields of study that have been moving uneasily toward one another for at least two decades. Most people think that computers are getting smarter, and that maybe someday, they’ll be as smart as we humans are. But Hawkins explains why the way we build computers today won’t take us down that path. He shows, using nicely accessible examples, that our brains are memory-driven systems that use our five senses and our perception of time, space, and consciousness in a way that’s totally unlike the relatively simple structures of even the most complex computer chip. Readers who gobbled up Ray Kurzweil’s (The Age of Spiritual Machines and Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open will find more intriguing food for thought here. Hawkins does a good job of outlining current brain research for a general audience, and his enthusiasm for brains is surprisingly contagious. –Therese Littleton
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Naive and speculative. The author is right criticizing neuroscience and AI, but the rest of the book is pure fiction without any arguments supporting it
Rating: 1 / 5
Most of the other reader reviews tend to fall in to one of two perspectives, either “Cheerleader” or “Nothing new here, move along”. Some readers are put off by the lack of academic rigor, paucity of research citings, and vague illustrations. Hawkins himself recognizes in the last chapter that this is not an academic paper, but an effort to make the concepts of the brain and their possible application to future artificial intelligence systems understandable to the laymen. He hopes that some of the more ambitious readers who are still deciding their life work will choose to pursue this area of study.
The complaint about the graphics is right on I believe, though it seems that the art of illustration has largely left the printed media. Certain chapters in this book would be greatly enhanced with 3-d renderings and even paper pop-up models as someone else suggested.
I also think that Hawkins wrote in a form that simulated the structure and operation of the cortex he was trying to explain. That is, he seemed to introduce broad, vague concepts with lots of feed-forward references to later, more detailed explanations. In trying to make the complexity of regions, layers, columns, neurons, synapses, dendrites, axons, etc more accessible, he attempted to drive our auto-associative patterns, placing specific information into previous, general patterns…I think.
The real downfall of the book I believe is when he assigns all of human characteristics and behavior to the complex, highly evolved but ultimately mechanical processes of the brain, leaving no room for metaphysical explanations. “There is no special sauce” he says, just electro-chemical operations in the brain. Gosh, Jeff, good thing you clued us in on this. Maybe there’s still time for the Pope to find a new career! With a single paragraph, Jeff dissed billions of people of hundreds of different belief systems that expect that there is a personal existance long after the brain stops functioning.
I guess I’m just not ready to write-off the possibility for divine intervention. Even Einstein admitted that, at some level, God plays a role. And Jeff, you’re smart, but you’re no Einstein.
FWIW,
Jason
Rating: 3 / 5
The question arises: why would the brain build models of anything? It doesn’t matter whether it is a memory and prediction machine or a sausage maker. Efficient causality is not formal causality. I can describe the factory process (the efficient cause) of production of a Ford perfectly but the formal cause–the organization that builds the cars is indispensible. The efficient cause of production would cease without the formal cause ascribed to the corporation. Describing what something does or its efficient causality of operation without tying it to some sort of formal causal identity or a mechanism that doesn’t arise all by itself is reductionism. Hawkins describes the process of how it may do some of what it does but he himself admits that the origin of invariant representation (what Plato and Aristotle called Form) is the greatest unsolved question of them all. The goal of all reductionism, as a philosophy, is to show that complex things somehow just are–there is no cause–outside of a self generating web of efficient causes–and reductionists don’t want there to be any causes because if there are causes, there are makers. They are all looking for the machine that makes itself–and there isn’t any such animal. It is all really very funny. These people are all looking for a causeless cause found in the material world–something a little lower than the God of the philosophers and certainly not the God of Christianity.
Wilhelmson, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century described knowing the form of a thing as “becoming the form itself on the plane of the act of knowledge.” You know what you know because you become it–you don’t know it because the brain is merely mocking up a series of impressions like a camera and feeding them to your sensorium. The whole question of invariant representation without a discussion of previous epistemologies that have attempted to address the issue is sophomoric. Hawkins, like many people thinks that because he has a new take on something that no one has thought about it before.
Rating: 3 / 5
The best thing that Hawkins can do is (continue to) funnel some of his wealth to real scientists doing real research on neuroscience and cognitive science. Him writing books is not going to help the field.
I came away feeling like Hawkins wrote a book to drum up interest in his company. The company will undoubtedly turn out some tech product that falls (far) short of Hawkins “real intelligence” (a *really* ridiculous choice of words, by the way).
If a nobody had written this book, it might not have been published. If Hawkins had submitted his work (in chunks) to a peer-reviewed scientific journal, I am certain that it would have been soundly rejected for making broad claims with little evidence. Overbroad, overly optimistic claims were a large reason that classical AI was disappointing to many, why neural nets have fallen in and out of favor repeatedly, and why Hawkins interest in cognitive science is worth only the research dollars he can shell out.
Rating: 1 / 5
I’ll admit I only made it a third of the way through the book, but up until that point, his assumptions first pop out of bad math. Then he builds wacktastic theories on top of his assumptions. I’m glad those theories opened the creativity for the positive reviewers, but for me, it wasted an hour of my life.
Rating: 1 / 5