Quotes from Jeff Hawkins

through the sensory nerves. The nerves only send spikes. And since we do not perceive spikes, everything we do perceive must be fabricated in the brain. Even the most basic feelings of light, sound, and touch are creations of the brain; they only exist in its model of the world.

There are neurons in the old part of our brain that are known to learn maps of the places we have visited, and these neurons have been under evolutionary pressure for so long that they are fine-tuned to do what they do. In mammals, the old brain parts where these map-creating neurons exist are called the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex.

Turing proved, mathematically, that if you choose the right set of rules for the CPU and give it an indefinitely long tape to work with, it can perform any definable set of operations in the universe. It would be one of many equivalent machines now called Universal Turing Machines.

is all 1's and 0's underneath, and any Turing Machine can be programmed to handle it. Information processing is information processing is information processing. All digital computers are logically equivalent.

Turing Test: if a computer can fool a human interrogator into thinking that it too is a person, then by definition the computer must be intelligent. And so, with the Turing Test as his measuring stick and the Turing Machine as his medium, Turing helped launch the field of AI. Its central dogma: the brain is just another kind of computer.

A CPU is just a collection of logic gates.

irrespective of the lack of biological evidence, that brains were just another kind of computer.

In the battle between the old brain and the neocortex, the old brain usually wins. We eat the cake.

Deep Blue didn't win by being smarter than a human; it won by being millions of times faster than a human. Deep Blue had no intuition.

In 2005, scientists in the lab of May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser used a similar experimental setup, again with rats. In their experiments, they recorded signals from neurons in the entorhinal cortex, adjacent to the hippocampus.

Chinese Room

Thus, no matter how cleverly a computer is designed to simulate intelligence by producing the same behavior as a human, it has

we needed to understand what "understanding

understanding cannot be measured by external behavior

Every time a rat enters an environment, the grid cells establish a reference frame. If it is a novel environment, the grid cells create a new reference frame. If the rat recognizes the environment, the grid cells reestablish the previously used reference frame.

We realized that the brain's model of the world is built using maplike reference frames. Not one reference frame, but hundreds of thousands of them. Indeed, we now understand that most of the cells in your neocortex are dedicated to creating and manipulating reference frames, which the brain uses to plan and think.

Although we can't know the details of the future, the Thousand Brains Theory can help us define the boundaries. Understanding how the brain creates intelligence tells us what things are possible, what things are not, and to some extent what advances are likely.

As inspired by Alan Turing, intelligence equals behavior.

incorrect assumptions keep us from seeing the correct answer.

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.

History shows that the best solutions to scientific problems are simple and elegant.

Discovering a useful reference frame is the most difficult part of learning, even though most of the time we are not consciously aware of it.

'Dream Act' kids are like all other American kids, with the exception that they have to work harder to excel in school, they live in fear of deportation, and they worry about their future.

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