A Profound Thought
Excerpt from Jeff Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. Basic Books New York, ISBN 97815416775792, 2022.
The most profound statement I have ever read about human intelligence appeared in this book by Jeff Hawkins on page 172 - 174.
"Life appeared on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago. From the beginning, the course that life took was ruled by genes and evolution. There is no plan or desired direction to evolution , Species evolved and went extinct based on their ability to leave offspring with copies of their genes. Life was driven by competitive survival and procreation. Nothing else mattered.
"Our intelligence has allowed our species, Homo sapiens, to flourish and succeed. In just a couple of hundred years - a near instant in geologic time - we have doubled our life expectancy, cured many diseases, and eliminated hunger for the vast majority of humans. We live healthier, are more comfortable, and toil less than our predecessors."
"Our intelligence has been the source of our success, but it has also become and existential threat. How we act in the coming years will determine whether our sudden rise leads to a sudden collapse - or alternately, if we exit this period of rapid change on a sustainable trajectory"...depends upon the risks associated with our intelligence.
"Your brain is in a box, the skull. There are no sensors in the brain itself, so the neurons that make up your brain are sitting in the dark, isolated from the world outside. The only way your brain knows anything about reality is through the sensory nerve fibers that enter the skull. The nerve fibers coming from you eyes, ears, and skin look the same, and the spikes that travel along them are identical. There is no light or sound entering the brain, only electric spikes."
"Notice there is no light, touch, or sound entering the brain. None of the perceptions that make up our mental experiences - from the fuzziness of a pet, to the sigh of a friend, to the colors of leaves - come through the sensory nerves. The nerves only send spikes. And since we do not perceive spikes, everything we perceive must be fabricated in the brain. Even the most basic feelings of light, sound, and touch are creations of the brain; they only exist in its model of the world."
"Two important points are that the brain only knows about a subset of the real world, and what we perceive is our model of the world, not the real world itself."