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.

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 ...

  Our ability to experience "virtual" worlds is not something new. Evolution has provided it as basic equipment along with our opposing thumbs. It's not a bug. It's a feature. On the most fundamental level, we are constantly experiencing the future and the past: the flow of time. This ability is essential to what we call purposeful behavior. We love to debate whether or not other animals have this ability and to what degree, but it's clear that we have it in spades. It is essential to who we are as humans. I am fascinated by how the brain produces the virtual world that we call "consciousness". It turns out to be quite a trick. Sense information arrives at different times. For example, sound and smell arrive with very little processing, but virtual information goes through massive complex analysis. Yet we experience it all at the "same time". We experience the decision to move after the brain has sent signals to move. Our experience slightly p...