Frames All The Way Down

By Wayne Brown


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 about language, which is a brain-to-brain communication device.  Theories of language, such as Chomsky's use frames to develop a theory of how language works.
Hawkins gets tripped up trying to describe complex frames, especially the ones that don't admit to a spatial interpretation. Object-Oriented Design has a rich language that applies directly. Starting at the simplest example, Hawkin's coffee cup, we can speak of objects as "frames". Object-Oriented concepts are extremely powerful in representing the real world - one reason these concepts underlie the Internet and some of its fundamental tools, such as Java.

Hawkins gets into trouble when he starts to speak as a neuroscientist, which he is not. He doesn't get published in Scientific Journals. In spite of his extensive knowledge of the subject, his ideas about how, exactly, columns in the neocortex create frames are sketchy, to say the least. But even here, he is pointing to a structure that is replicated all over the neocortex (the famous thousand brains). If we assume that we think in frames we may be forgiven to think that some structure in the brain is involved. Due to the enormous parallelism and recursiveness in experience, we would expect a large number of similar structures, not some kind of "organ".

Hawkins is particularly interested in the predictive nature of consciousness. I think he could be challenged on this. The brain is obviously filling in what it "expects" to be there but I am not quite sure we need the "priming" idea. It seems the brain "sees" what it expects to see in a "frame". What needs to be explained is how effortlessly it does this and how we are alerted to aspects of the real frame that are out of place. We know that this mechanism often fails, as in the phenomenon of "Change Blindness". In fact, it seems that change blindness may be the Achilles Heel for this aspect of Hawkins' theory. On the other hand, answering this question could turn out to provide strong extra evidence for the theory. 

Many applications in the Internet are at least attempting to be "predictive" - filling in details before the query is completed. "Type Ahead" is something we all experience. Hawkins seems to think that this is something "AI" can't do.

My thinking on this subject rides off in several directions.
  • How it is that certain "virtual" environments, such as Second Life, feel so "real". Hawkins' ideas about felt reality are applicable.
  • How do frames work in non-spacial domains, such as language, physics, and mathematics?
  • Is the Universe actually built of frames or does it just look that way?
  • Hawkins' book is very light on visual examples that would show the nested and recursive nature of the frames he is talking about. I'd like to provide some examples and perhaps shed some doubt on the idea that a "frame" is manifested in a column of the neocortex. 
  • I'd like to present an alternative interpretation of the neurological "facts" in Hawkin's book. Specifically, I think a "frame" corresponds to a network of active neurons in the brain. There is an interesting visual example in Second Life, where a "frame" (a specific location in the world) "rezzes" a bit at a time, providing a way to think of how a frame could resolve itself almost instantly even though it is full of nested frames.
=================

* I use "frame" to refer to Hawkins' "reference frames"

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