Quotes from Jeff Hawkins

Our bodies are hanging along for the ride, but my brain is talking to your brain. And if we want to understand who we are and how we feel and perceive, we really understand what brains are.

A lot of America's success is because we're an open society and haven't brought dogma or religious influence into the American political process.

I do two things. I design mobile computers and I study brains.

Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neo-cortex, and the foundation of intelligence.

In grade school I was taught that the United States is a melting pot. People from all over the world come here for freedom and to pursue a better life. They arrive with next to nothing, work incredibly hard, learn a new language and new customs, and in a generation they become an integral part of our amazing nation.

The key to artificial intelligence has always been the representation.

It is the ability to make predictions about the future that is the crux of intelligence.

It is human nature - aka old brain - to suspect everyone wants to steal your idea, where the reality is that you are lucky if anyone cares about your idea at all.

But intelligence is not just a matter of acting or behaving intelligently. Behavior is a manifestation of intelligence, but not the central characteristic or primary definition of being intelligent. A moment's reflection proves this: You can be intelligent just lying in the dark, thinking and understanding. Ignoring what goes on in your head and focusing instead on behavior has been a large impediment to understanding intelligence and building intelligent machines

The way to eliminate the harm caused by stereotypes is to teach our children to recognize false stereotypes, to be empathetic, and to be skeptical. We need to promote these critical-thinking skills in addition to instilling the best values we know. Skepticism, the heart of the scientific method, is the only way we know how to ferret out fact from fiction.

AI scientists tried to program computers to act like humans without first answering what intelligence is and what it means to understand. They left out the most important part of building intelligent machines, the intelligence! "Real intelligence" makes the point that before we attempt to build intelligent machines, we have to first understand how the brain thinks, and there is nothing artificial about that. Only then can we ask how we can build intelligent machines

When you ask yourself, What does an intelligent system do?, it is intuitively obvious to think in terms of behavior. We demonstrate human intelligence through our speech, writing, and actions, right? Yes, but only to a point. Intelligence is something that is happening in your head. Behavior is an optional ingredient. This is not intuitively obvious, but it's not hard to understand either.

The brain is an organ that builds models and makes creative predictions, but its models and predictions can as easily be specious as valid. Our brains are always looking at patterns and making analogies. If correct correlations cannot be found, the brain is more than happy to accept false ones. Pseudoscience, bigotry, faith, and intolerance are often rooted in false analogy.

The best ideas in science are always simple, elegant, and unexpected

There is a common misconception that the human brain is the pinnacle of billions of years of evolution. This may be true if we think of the entire nervous system. However, the human neocortex itself is a relatively new structure and hasn't been around long enough to undergo much long-term evolutionary refinement.

I believe consciousness is simply what it feels like to have a neocortex.

The neocortex is not like a computer, parallel or otherwise. Instead of computing answers to problems the neocortex uses stored memories to solve problems and produce behavior.

Our neocortex has invented powerful technologies that are capable of changing the entire Earth, but the human behavior that controls these world-changing technologies is often dominated by the selfish and shortsighted old brain.

Intelligence and understanding started as a memory system that fed predictions into the sensory system. These predictions are the essense of understanding. To know something means that you can make predictions about it.

Being human and being intelligent are separate matters.

life is not about having a correct model of the world. Life is about replication.

The unit of processing in the neocortex is the cortical column. Each column is a complete sensory-motor system—that is, it gets inputs and it can generate behaviors.

We are intelligent not because we can do one thing particularly well, but because we can learn to do practically anything.

A future driven by genes has little to no direction and only short-term goals: stay healthy, have kids, enjoy life. A future designed in the best interest of knowledge has both direction and end goals.