'Visual Intelligence' by Donald Hoffman (1998)

Visual Intelligence is subtitled ‘How We Create What We See’ and in it Hoffman sets down a tentative set of ‘rules’ that humans use to interpret the visual input from our eyes. These rules work in combination to build up lines, shapes, colors, 3-d placement and more. You can try some of the visual illusions that help to show how the rules can allow us to be ‘tricked’ in many ways, such that your sense of what you’re seeing is not what is really there…

In the final chapters, Hoffman argues that we do the same thing with the input from our other senses as we do with the visual input; we create representations that are well-adapted to our survival. And he goes further, to say that our representations, while they must be taken seriously, are not necessarily a guide to what is ‘really’ out there…

I believe these are important points. Clearly we only pick up on certain spectrums of all that is ‘out there’ while other organisms are able to to pick up different spectrums, and may have very different (but also effective) rules for interpreting the input. Given this, can we really take seriously the idea that we are somehow close to understanding the universe? I’d say it would be foolish to think so.

'A Different Universe' by Robert Laughlin

A Different Universe is very new book by Stanford physics professor (and Nobel winner) Robert Laughlin. His thesis is that we are leaving the age of reductionism and entering the age of emergence. By this he means that we may well have learned one set of fundamental laws of how matter works, but there are many limits to what we can do with these laws in terms of predicting higher-level collective phenomenon.

The book is written for the layman (ie. no equations!), and I still found some of the detail hard to understand, but the main point comes across. One example of what he’s describing is the behavior of elements as they go through phase transitions (while we’re used to thinking of gas, liquid, solid, there are apparently many other states at extreme temperatures). These phases exhibit certain properties which are consistent with the fundamental laws, yet have new behaviors that no one could predict from those laws. Only though experimental measurement have we found out about these states.  So the physical laws do not determine (and thus predict) all the outcomes, they are more like constraints.

I find myself in agreement with his thesis; I too believe there is much more that we can discover about how the universe works. The book is entertaining but perhaps a bit light once getting the main concept across.

'On Intelligence' by Jeff Hawkins (2004)

When I first saw this book, On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins (he worked on the Palm Pilot), I was interested but a bit skeptical. There are lots of books on the subject and I wasn’t sure if this would be worth reading. But I picked it up in an airport, and found it to be very interesting.

His thesis boils down to the idea that intelligence is about processing patterns over time, and predicting what patterns will come next. He says that all our sensory inputs, whether vision, hearing, taste, etc. all are converted to patterns of impulses. A single moment of impulse is typically not too interesting; it’s the changes in the patterns over time that are of interest. In the neocortex of the brain, the structure appears to be six layers, where patterns are detected and increasingly cross-verified. He claims that we are continually processing the inputs we get, to either confirm the patterns we are expecting or to find that something new is happening and adjusting. The patterns aren’t hard-wired into the brain; they are learned from experience. (My apologies if I’m oversimplifying way too much!).

Side note: Hawkins' idea of the changes relates to Gregory Bateson's notion of difference.

This all seems sensible enough to me. He goes on to claim that we can build machines that will be able to do this type of pattern processing; though he’s less interested in the attempt to build physical ‘robot’ type machines that physically move in ways that we move. I find this more likely than Ray Kurzweil’s claims that we will be downloading humans in the next 40 years.