June 15, 2006: On Intelligence?

I have to begin by saying that I am always skeptical when anyone, even a close friend, tells me I absolutely must read a book. This is the way I was introduced to On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins (with the assistance of Sandra Blakeslee); and I am writing this to give some sense of the way I felt when I checked the book out of the San Francisco Public Library. While I do not always judge a book on the basis of the most immediate first impressions, the "Prologue" had such an impact that I figured I had better set down my thoughts while they are fresh. My most important observation is that I think I have already read the punch line (the memory-prediction model, or at least something with a strong family resemblance to it). I had to do a bit of digging; but I am pretty sure I came across this story in Karl Pribram's Languages of the Brain, which I read when I was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. This book came out in 1971. On the one hand I am surprised that Hawkins did not find it in his local library, since the timing would have been about right; and I remember Pribram being the first author I encountered who tried to write with clarity about how the brain worked. (A major theme in Hawkins' "Prologue" is that he decided to write this book because he has been looking for a book about how they brain works ever since his youth.) On the other hand I discovered that the book was neither in the San Francisco Public Library or in any of the on-line collections I managed to find with the help of My Web 2.0. I have not kept up with my reading of Pribram to determine whether his more recent stuff still holds to the same model; but the appearance of "holonomy" in the subtitle of Brain and Perception leads me to believe that his basic theme is still there.

So I am not going to fault Hawkins for being unaware of Pribram, even if I find it a bit strange that he did not encounter the material over the last 25 years. (Pribram seems to have been on Howard Gardner's radar.) Where I am more skeptical is what I would call the extreme reductionism of Hawkins' position that essentially abstracts out anything that has to do with behavior. The result is that "it's all about the brain;" and that brain may as well be in a vat, rather than integrated into a "whole body" system. (Having made that extreme reduction, I can then appreciate that he takes it one more step to "it's all about the neocortex.") So he writes off the body as relevant context for the brain, which means that he also writes off the social context of the body.

None of this means that I shall dismiss the book. I intend to take advantage of the fact that I have it for at least three weeks. However, both my enthusiasm and my expectations have diminished. I am still willing to believe that there is value in what Hawkins has achieved, but the framework may be narrower than the title leads one to believe. This, I fear, is a standard symptom of techno-centric thinking: Carve off the slice of the problem that you think you can work and then posit it to be the whole ball of wax!