How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

by Ray Kurzweil

Through an unending recursive process we are capable of building ideas that are ever more complex. We call this vast array of recursively linked ideas knowledge. Only

The operating principle of the neocortex is arguably the most important idea in the world, as it is capable of representing all knowledge and skills as well as creating new knowledge.

As MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung says, “Identity lies not in our genes, but in the connections between our brain cells.”

Darwin argued that in each generation the individuals that could best survive in their ecological niche would be the individuals to create the next generation.

This suggests that our memories are sequential and in order. They can be accessed in the order that they are remembered. We are unable to directly reverse the sequence of a memory.

This suggests that there are no images, videos, or sound recordings stored in the brain. Our memories are stored as sequences of patterns. Memories that are not accessed dim over time.

We can recognize a pattern even if only part of it is perceived (seen, heard, felt) and even if it contains alterations. Our recognition ability is apparently able to detect invariant features of a pattern—characteristics that survive real-world variations.

our conscious experience of our perceptions is actually changed by our interpretations.

we are constantly predicting the future and hypothesizing what we will experience. This expectation influences what we actually perceive. Predicting the future is actually the primary reason that we have a brain.

Some of our memories are sufficiently robust that we can go directly from a question (such as who played Queen Padmé) to the answer; often we need to go through a series of triggers until we find one that works.

each of our routine procedures is remembered as an elaborate hierarchy of nested activities. The same type of hierarchy is involved in our ability to recognize objects and situations.

We do know the neocortex is responsible for our ability to deal with patterns of information and to do so in a hierarchical fashion.

These recognizers are capable of wiring themselves to one another throughout the course of a lifetime, so the elaborate connectivity (between modules) that we see in the neocortex is not prespecified by the genetic code, but rather is created to reflect the patterns we actually learn over time.

There are about a half million cortical columns in a human neocortex, each occupying a space about two millimeters high and a half millimeter wide and containing about 60,000 neurons (resulting in a total of about 30 billion neurons in the neocortex). A rough estimate is that each pattern recognizer within a cortical column contains about 100 neurons, so there are on the order of 300 million pattern recognizers in total in the neocortex.

Human beings have only a weak ability to process logic, but a very deep core capability of recognizing patterns.

In the neocortex the “name” of a pattern is simply the axon that emerges from each pattern processor; when that axon fires, its corresponding pattern has been recognized.

The neocortex is, therefore, predicting what it expects to encounter. Envisaging the future is one of the primary reasons we have a neocortex.

This is the reason why old memories may seem to suddenly jump into our awareness. Having been buried and not activated for perhaps years, they need a trigger in the same way that a Web page needs a Web link to be activated.

Recursion, according to Chomsky, is the ability to put together small parts into a larger chunk, and then use that chunk as a part in yet another structure, and to continue this process iteratively. In this way we are able to build the elaborate structures of sentences and paragraphs from a limited set of words.

Even in this case our memory is not a strict sequence of words, but rather of language structures that we need to translate into specific word sequences each time we deliver the story. That is why we tell a story a bit differently each time we share it

That is why memories grow dimmer with time: The amount of redundancy becomes reduced until certain memories become extinct.

The ability to recognize patterns even when aspects of them are transformed is called feature invariance,

The central assumption in Hebb’s theory is that the basic unit of learning in the neocortex is the neuron.

The basic unit of the neocortex is a module of neurons, which I estimate at around a hundred.

“Even though we think we see the world so fully, what we are receiving is really just hints, edges in space and time,”

Dopamine in particular is a neurotransmitter involved in the experience of pleasure.

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that plays a major role in the regulation of mood.

It is fair to say that our emotional experiences take place in both the old and the new brains. Thinking takes place in the new brain (the neocortex), but feeling takes place in both.

The ecstatic phase of love leads to the attachment phase and ultimately to a long-term bond. There are chemicals that encourage this process as well, including oxytocin and vasopressin.

Experiments have shown that neural nets can learn their subject matter even with unreliable teachers. If the teacher is correct only 60 percent of the time, the student neural net will still learn its lessons with an accuracy approaching 100 percent.

When using GAs you must, however, be careful what you ask for. A genetic algorithm was used to solve a block-stacking problem, and it came up with a perfect solution…except that it had thousands of steps. The human programmers forgot to include minimizing the number of steps in their evaluation function.

However, I would maintain that there must be an essential mathematical equivalence to a high degree of precision between the actual biology and our attempt to emulate it; otherwise these systems would not work as well as they do.

we cannot now easily expand the size of our frontal lobes by a factor of a thousand, or even by 10 percent. That is, we cannot do so biologically, but that is exactly what we will do technologically.

Finally, our new brain needs a purpose. A purpose is expressed as a series of goals. In the case of our biological brains, our goals are established by the pleasure and fear centers that we have inherited from the old brain.

In 1939 Turing designed an electronic calculator called Bombe that helped decode messages that had been encrypted by the Nazi Enigma coding machine.

Von Neumann’s fundamental insight was that there is an essential equivalence between a computer and the brain.

I just mentioned the concept of metacognition—the idea of thinking about one’s own thinking—as one such correlate of consciousness.

Another definition of qualia is the feeling of an experience.

So the Hameroff-Penrose thesis is that the microtubules in the neurons are doing quantum computing and that this is responsible for consciousness.

While these observations certainly support the idea of plasticity in the neocortex, their more interesting implication is that we each appear to have two brains, not one, and we can do pretty well with either. If we lose one, we do lose the cortical patterns that are uniquely stored there, but each brain is in itself fairly complete. So does each hemisphere have its own consciousness? There is an argument to be made that such is the case.

We are apparently very eager to explain and rationalize our actions, even when we didn’t actually make the decisions that led to them.

But it should not surprise us that mental activity, even in the motor cortex, would start before we were aware that there was a decision to be made.

argues that if events in the past, present, and future are determined, then we can be considered to have no control over them or their consequences. Our apparent decisions and actions are simply part of this predetermined sequence. To Ginet, this rules out free will.

Continuity does allow for continual change, so whereas I am somewhat different than I was yesterday, I nonetheless have the same identity.

But when one paradigm runs out of steam (for example, when engineers were no longer able to reduce the size and cost of vacuum tubes in the 1950s), it creates research pressure to create the next paradigm, and so another S-curve of progress begins.

Intelligence evolved because it was useful for survival—a fact that may seem obvious, but one with which not everyone agrees.