Proust and the Squid is a classic analysis of reading. Reading is a learned activity that involves nested multi-tasking between  Character recognition Word recognition Sentence parsing  Context detection Imagination - the oldest form of Virtual Reality Criticism  Both Hawkins' Frame theory and Surfaces and Essences analogy-based theory is relevant. I lost the actual hard copy but finally remembered the title and bought the book for Kindle.

DRAFT ... Some "nerdy" thoughts as I try to get a "feel" for what experience is, according to Hawkins. Some back of the envelope numbers ... Hawkins does a great job of introducing a way of watching how consciousness works. Since reading his ideas, I have attempted to observe my own experience in the same way. Being a computer nerd, I think in terms of processing power, parallel threads, pixels, and resolution. According to the theory, my experience of the world is created by 100,000 "minds", creating 100,000 nested "frames". The computer screen I am using has 1920 x 1068 pixels, each capable of displaying Red, Green, and Blue in varying intensities = about 2 million pixels. A typical Web page has hundreds of screen elements that the computer decodes and displays smoothly and seamlessly. The retina of the eye has 130 million sensors but the signal to the brain involves about 10% of them at any given time. Without going into details, the computati...

In the long run, Hawkins abandons his initial description of "Frame" and (to my mind) wanders into simple Object Oriented Design and Mathematical constructs that lie behind Quantum Mechanics. I'm not sure gets this, but he starts with a frame-based description of consciousness, which is a fine example of putting this phenomenon on the test bench. Many philosophers claim this is not possible. Daniel Dennet is happy to allow what we say about our experience to be evidence of what that experience is. The problem with Dennet is that he was writing decades before Hawkins used the powerful frame language to speak of what it "feels like" to be in the world. Armed with Hawkins' way of speaking, it may be a good idea to loop back and read Dennet again. With apologies to Hawkins, this is what I think a frame is: It is a frame of reference like Cartesian space It contains objects, each of which has a location in the space - for example, (x,y,z) coordinates. In object-...

I have been rather dismissive of Hawkins' " Thousand Brains " idea but I can't help thinking he's on to something, specifically: Once you broaden your understanding of what a "frame*" is, it is quite plausible that people think in frames. The most powerful computer system we have built so far, the Internet, runs on a relatively simple "frame language", understood by over a billion "hosts" including the one you are reading this on. Hawkins provides a plausible description of human experience in terms of "frames" somehow being the unit of experience. It is plausible that the neocortex has some kind of structure that implements frames, including the ability to create frames "on the fly" and use them as a unit of memory and reasoning. Thousand Brain is not too dissimilar from the theory presented in Surfaces and Essences, which presents analogy as the "fuel of thought". "Surfaces" is really talking ...

I posted this review of " A Thousand Brain s" on Amazon. Bottom line, there are great ideas but, at bottom, the "science" in it is extremely shakey. If you toss out the hardware ideas and focus on the systems analysis, it's brilliant. This reminds me of another great book on the workings of the mind, Surfaces, and Essences . In that book, the authors wisely steer clear of speculating on how analogy and metaphor are implemented in the brain. "A Thousand Brains" can be profitably read in this spirit. In subsequent posts, I will be seeing what can be done with Hawkins' theory if we see it as systems analysis rather than neuroscience. " AMAZON REVIEW If this is the only neuroscience book you read, you'd think neural columns are a "thing". I am reminded of the brilliant idea of "memes", which fell apart due to the inability to define them rigorously. It is no coincidence that Richard Dawkins (inventor of the meme) is over th...

Assuming everything is observable in principle at least, we have two sets of interest: Meme space available to the individual (roughly their "vocabulary" of ideas Meme space available to the group (what ideas can be communicated) Any model is made exponentially more useful if it can be made dynamic. We can make the model dynamic by observing what ideas are communicated at any time. We can spot trends. "Big Data" techniques allow is to scoop up vast amounts of data from the Internet, providing good maps of how "memes" turn up down to the individual level. We can also see what ideas are being shared between individuals and groups.  Along the way of using the model, we are bound to discover its limitations. One obvious one is defining the slippery concept of "meme." The common meaning of meme these days refers to anything that gets spread on the internet, especially some catchy picture. We need to pay attention to this concept since "ideas...

Notes on a conversation with a friend ... The subject of time has fascinated me since I was a little kid. Time is a real thing - an aspect of the platform that reality is built on. But physics fails to put a finger on the moment we call "now". In one direction, the one we call "future', what will happen is fundamentally unknowable before it happens. That comes out of Chaos theory and Quantum Mechanics. On a more subtle level, we are also unable to know the past in detail. In my experience, philosophers and theology shine no light on these issues, but often claim ersatz credibility by dropping references, especially to Quantum Mechanics, hoping that most of their audience will not understand the reference. On a psychological level, it is not clear why the "present" has any special status when it comes to "knowability". Neurologically speaking, there is no "now", only an experience of what I consider to be a dynamic change in the state of ...