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Comment by neuronexmachina | Hacker News Reader

For some context, this paper is from Numenta, Jeff Hawkins' company. Hawkins was the founder of Palm/Handspring back in the 90s. Afterwards he became quite interested in neuroscience and neural networks, and pulled a Wolfram in his 2004 book "On Intelligence" with claims that he had a unified theory of how the brain works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins

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As a former neuroscientist, the majority of people who claim to have grand unified theories of the brain are those who haven't studied it enough to know how far we still have to go.

Well, Hawkins isn't one of them.

neuronexmachina's flippant comment misrepresents Hawkins and On Intelligence, which lays out in popular form a scientific theory of neocortical function, with perfectly sane perspective on what that means in the context of the whole brain, due references to neuroscience, suggestions for experimental tests and obvious awareness that the theory may prove wrong or incomplete.

I'm disturbed to see that two of the early comments here contribute nothing of value and amount to little more that personal attacks by way of misinformation.

Let me clarify. I'm not just a former neuroscientist; my field was consciousness and perception. Rightly or wrongly (as you may believe), nobody in the field is reading Hawkins.

What we do see a lot of, are people getting enamored of consciousness and dipping their toes in. For all I know Hawkins is an unheard-of genius, but his stuff reads like many of the dilettantes I've already seen.

Nevertheless I appreciate his efforts and just bought his book, because having an idea is way different from putting own money in it. He puts his own money to neuroscience, and does not compete with real scientists for government grants.

Other millionaires may buy yachts, or just spread "novel" ideas (e.g. Hyperloop idea by St. Elon) without investing their own money.

I appreciate and agree with your perspective on putting your money where your mouth is, but Elon is the last person to criticize in that context. He quite literally put all of his money into the problems that he thinks are the most valuable to work on (whether you agree with him or not).

False. He didn't put a single dollar into Hyperloop (idea that was researched since 100 years ago, and general conclusion is that it's not worth it, too expensive to maintain).

The book being from 2004 is kind of outdated. Nevertheless fun to read.

Agreed, hence my comparison to Wolfram. Like Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science," he wrote a nice book that was a pretty decent layman's summary of the field, but includes conclusions that aren't anywhere near as revolutionary as he thinks they are.

Hawkings was the PI at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute. Which is now part of Berkeley. He is not an outsider (15+ years of research). You could argue though, that Numenta is more focused on bringing these methods to market, then solely doing research. I get that this doesn't always resonate well with people in academia.

Are you sure he was actually a PI, and not just a funder? According to their list of publications (http://redwood.berkeley.edu/wiki/Publications), Hawkins is not an author on any of them. He's also not listed on the "People" page (http://redwood.berkeley.edu/wiki/People_at_the_Redwood_Cente...), even as an alumnus.

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