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Whenever I hear Hawkins speak I wonder whether he’s a genius or a glorious charlatan. His theories on brain function are interesting, but he always makes these

Whenever I hear Hawkins speak I wonder whether he’s a genius or a glorious charlatan. His theories on brain function are interesting, but he always makes these gross simplifications that don’t really fly. That old brain/new brain thing is an example. The brain is not as modular as he tries to make us believe. Neither part can function on its own, and just because he thinks he has understood neocortex this doesn’t mean the parts he doesn’t understand are irrelevant. But: his theories are a great source of inspiration, because they are bold and we would all like to believe them because we think we understand the basic principles. For many, this is enough to trigger their curiosity and dive into neuroscience and AI. Mission accomplished.

mordymoop 6y ago
He reminds me of myself back when I was an academic. I had a glorious capacity to genuinely believe that whatever I was working on was extremely important, and the hidebound fools in the establishment failed to appreciate my work because of a combination of inertia, stupidity, and possibly corruption. When I got some distance from it realized that my ideas were just moderately interesting and only barely novel, and the implications weren't as big as I wanted them to be. The greatest indication that Hawkins is directionally right but also substantially wrong is the fact that GPT-3, AlphaZero, etc. are capable of such amazing things with such a uniform architecture, that nonetheless don't really look the way he thinks they should. Personally, I think he underestimates the degree to which huge classes of machine learning algorithms are basically just different ways of instantiating the same concepts.