I just finished reading Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence. Hawkins -- the developer of the Palm Pilot -- has delved into cortical physiology to explain a model of thought and memory that provides a testable theory of intelligence. Hawkins' raison d'etre is to develop a model of intelligence that can be transduced into digital processing systems.
I am not a neurophysiologist, and Hawkins freely admits his theories are subject to controversy within the scientific community. His independent scholarship is, in my eyes, quite admirable, and he has the personal resources to pursue a research program that will certainly move the state of the art forward. The important notion is that the brain is a pattern matching and generation system that predicts existence, taking sensory input and piecing it together with memory. It is physical affirmation that much of what we experience as reality are, in fact,
Hawkins book provided me with a new appreciation for meta-thinking and meta-appreciation. It provided a new way of understanding some peculiar experiences -- where I could not literally understand my own senses It's particularly exciting as Hawkins has chosen to carve out a niche in developing a computing paradigm that extends the capacities of intelligence without humanizing it -- recognizing that the capabilities of intelligent system do not result in systems that in any way emulate or mimc human behavior.
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