The Hawkins Frame - 1

In the long run, Hawkins abandons his initial description of "Frame" and (to my mind) wanders into simple Object Oriented Design and Mathematical constructs that lie behind Quantum Mechanics. I'm not sure gets this, but he starts with a frame-based description of consciousness, which is a fine example of putting this phenomenon on the test bench. Many philosophers claim this is not possible. Daniel Dennet is happy to allow what we say about our experience to be evidence of what that experience is. The problem with Dennet is that he was writing decades before Hawkins used the powerful frame language to speak of what it "feels like" to be in the world. Armed with Hawkins' way of speaking, it may be a good idea to loop back and read Dennet again.

With apologies to Hawkins, this is what I think a frame is:

• It is a frame of reference like Cartesian space
• It contains objects, each of which has a location in the space - for example, (x,y,z) coordinates.
• In object-oriented terms, coordinates are attributes of the object within the space. Other attributes include orientation (such as an (x,y,z) vector).
• Although it is not entirely clear, it seems that these objects also have a "velocity" vector - they may be moving through the reference frame.
• The observer occupies a position in the framework and has a complex set of objects that can be used to interrogate objects in the space. In a sense, the observer experiences this set of objects as "self". An example would be fingers exploring his beloved coffee cup. We will call these objects "sensors".
• A key element of Hawkins' account is the interaction between sensors and objects in the space to determine (or guess) the attributes of the objects. This interrogation results in an updated version of the frame itself - as modeled by the brain.
• All this is experienced dynamically - there is time in Hawkin's frame. When we speak of our experience, we call it "now", but "now" is always changing. This is the flow of time. We can be grateful for any model that makes an attempt to explain this most important aspect of the experience.
• Unlike an abstract mathematical "object", a frame is an experience. When we describe it as a mathematical object, we rely on analogy. This is the entire point of the Hawkins "frame". It is claimed to be the fundamental unit of experience, not the actual "God's Eye" view of the world, nor an abstract description of the world "as it is". It is a mental model, presumably implemented with neurons and synapses. As far as I know, this is the only attempt to formalize experience itself.

Some elements here remind me of Einstein's insight - particularly placing the observer in space and making observations relative to the frame of reference. In both cases, there is no "God's eye" view of the space, only the observations of the observer and the conclusions the observer reaches, such as the position and velocity of objects in the frame of reference. If you are familiar with Einstein's view of the world, Hawkins' "frames" are easy to picture.

Along the same line, Einstein was interested in the ability to interrogate objects to determine their properties. It turns out that it is not possible to learn certain pairs of properties exactly, say a and b. Precision in the measurement of a loses precision in b. Worst yet, counterintuitive, certain objects' properties don't exist until they are measured. But that is a different subject.

The point is that Einstein's mental picture of the Universe is a frame. A very powerful one. What it lacks is a sense of "now". Time is just another dimension, like the x,y,z of space.

Hawkins is shy about generalizing this model - sticking to our familiar 3-dimensional world. He could have escaped this a little by referring to the attributes of an object, which can be more or less unlimited. It would have been clearer (to me at least) if his model included the interrogation of the object, returning another frame since the object itself has all the attributes of a reference frame. Certain sensors are limited to certain queries - "touch" returns information that "look at" does not.

Anyone familiar with Object-Oriented design would wish to add (at least) object states which add some complexity to the result coming back from a query sensor. Other things like the concept of "interface" would be helpful to isolate the "experience" of the object from any secret and unobservable properties that may or may not produce the experience. The whole of OOD* seems applicable, and for good reason: OOD* has been developed precisely to describe (at least) the real world.

That said, there are aspects of the world where OOD doesn't seem very helpful, such as chemistry, cosmology, logic, mathematics, and Quantum Mechanics. Hawkins runs into these limitations since he claims his theory covers all we can know. His theory is only a re-invention or application of OOD - a special case. OOD covers a lot more of what we can know. It underlies the design of virtually all modern computer systems, including the Internet. But we must turn to other ways of "knowing" when leaving the familiar 3-dimensional world described in Hawkins' examples.

To be fair, the areas of knowledge where the Hawkins frames start to break down are precisely those that many find difficult to understand. We are also left with the biggest and most urgent things we need to understand: human-to-human interactions.

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* OOD = Object-Oriented Design

Frames All The Way Down

I have been rather dismissive of Hawkins' "Thousand Brains" idea but I can't help thinking he's on to something, specifically:

• Once you broaden your understanding of what a "frame*" is, it is quite plausible that people think in frames. The most powerful computer system we have built so far, the Internet, runs on a relatively simple "frame language", understood by over a billion "hosts" including the one you are reading this on.
• Hawkins provides a plausible description of human experience in terms of "frames" somehow being the unit of experience.
• It is plausible that the neocortex has some kind of structure that implements frames, including the ability to create frames "on the fly" and use them as a unit of memory and reasoning.
• Thousand Brain is not too dissimilar from the theory presented in Surfaces and Essences, which presents analogy as the "fuel of thought". "Surfaces" is really talking about language, which is a brain-to-brain communication device.  Theories of language, such as Chomsky's use frames to develop a theory of how language works.

Hawkins gets tripped up trying to describe complex frames, especially the ones that don't admit to a spatial interpretation. Object-Oriented Design has a rich language that applies directly. Starting at the simplest example, Hawkin's coffee cup, we can speak of objects as "frames". Object-Oriented concepts are extremely powerful in representing the real world - one reason these concepts underlie the Internet and some of its fundamental tools, such as Java.

Hawkins gets into trouble when he starts to speak as a neuroscientist, which he is not. He doesn't get published in Scientific Journals. In spite of his extensive knowledge of the subject, his ideas about how, exactly, columns in the neocortex create frames are sketchy, to say the least. But even here, he is pointing to a structure that is replicated all over the neocortex (the famous thousand brains). If we assume that we think in frames we may be forgiven to think that some structure in the brain is involved. Due to the enormous parallelism and recursiveness in experience, we would expect a large number of similar structures, not some kind of "organ".

Hawkins is particularly interested in the predictive nature of consciousness. I think he could be challenged on this. The brain is obviously filling in what it "expects" to be there but I am not quite sure we need the "priming" idea. It seems the brain "sees" what it expects to see in a "frame". What needs to be explained is how effortlessly it does this and how we are alerted to aspects of the real frame that are out of place. We know that this mechanism often fails, as in the phenomenon of "Change Blindness". In fact, it seems that change blindness may be the Achilles Heel for this aspect of Hawkins' theory. On the other hand, answering this question could turn out to provide strong extra evidence for the theory. 

Many applications in the Internet are at least attempting to be "predictive" - filling in details before the query is completed. "Type Ahead" is something we all experience. Hawkins seems to think that this is something "AI" can't do.

My thinking on this subject rides off in several directions.

• How it is that certain "virtual" environments, such as Second Life, feel so "real". Hawkins' ideas about felt reality are applicable.
• How do frames work in non-spacial domains, such as language, physics, and mathematics?
• Is the Universe actually built of frames or does it just look that way?
• Hawkins' book is very light on visual examples that would show the nested and recursive nature of the frames he is talking about. I'd like to provide some examples and perhaps shed some doubt on the idea that a "frame" is manifested in a column of the neocortex. 
• I'd like to present an alternative interpretation of the neurological "facts" in Hawkin's book. Specifically, I think a "frame" corresponds to a network of active neurons in the brain. There is an interesting visual example in Second Life, where a "frame" (a specific location in the world) "rezzes" a bit at a time, providing a way to think of how a frame could resolve itself almost instantly even though it is full of nested frames.

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* I use "frame" to refer to Hawkins' "reference frames"

See also

Object Oriented Design

The Languate of Information Science

A Thousand Brains

I posted this review of "A Thousand Brains" on Amazon. Bottom line, there are great ideas but, at bottom, the "science" in it is extremely shakey. If you toss out the hardware ideas and focus on the systems analysis, it's brilliant. This reminds me of another great book on the workings of the mind, Surfaces, and Essences. In that book, the authors wisely steer clear of speculating on how analogy and metaphor are implemented in the brain. "A Thousand Brains" can be profitably read in this spirit.

In subsequent posts, I will be seeing what can be done with Hawkins' theory if we see it as systems analysis rather than neuroscience.

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AMAZON REVIEW

If this is the only neuroscience book you read, you'd think neural columns are a "thing". I am reminded of the brilliant idea of "memes", which fell apart due to the inability to define them rigorously. It is no coincidence that Richard Dawkins (inventor of the meme) is over the moon about columns and frameworks.

Even so, Hawkins' insights about the constraints a brain theory must satisfy is insightful,  and probably a major stepping stone.

But while he tells me a lot of new interesting facts about neuron function, his idea that a column is a little prediction machine is presented without evidence. Even if the idea is true, Hawkins seems to miss the fact that a single column MUST participate in multiple frames, therefore there is no one-to-one correspondence between frames and columns. Frames are created by a set of related neurons firing. If these relationships are, as he claimed, determined by the synapses at the neuron, the frame is ultimately a network of synapses, or the connected neurons firing together. This cannot be a new insight. The book repeatedly leaves the impression that is the column that is "learning" to predict, rather than the network of columns. As they said about Freud, what's true ain't new, what's new ain't true.

The fallacy is quite evident in the title, which hints that our brain is really a thousand "micro-brains". While the number is impressive, we seem to be able to learn and recognize an infinite number of frames. Such a huge number can be reached if "frames" are combinations of synapses of which we have 125 trillion. The number of possible COMBINATIONS of 125 trillion synapses is, for all practical purposes, infinite.

This is not to say that "frameworks" are not a great idea. They satisfy a lot of the constraints that the author sets out. The brain probably does work this way. But if we look deeply, the frame theory works on its own and has nothing to do with the hardware that supposedly implements it. The hardware in the title.

As an engineer, the author sails off into Science Fiction when he claims he knows enough to build a general-purpose AI.  This is not to say that he will not come up with something interesting.

A general-purpose machine that implements frames already exists: the Internet. If we examine any Web page in detail, we will see it is bristling with links under the hood (these can be seen in the HTML that creates the page). Your iPhone screen is a frame, as are all the icons. The software that drives the icons is "object-oriented", full of links and references to other objects in the world. Individual objects participate in multiple frames. This is technology now 30 years old. Its fundamentals can be grasped by any intelligent layman. They are simple, but not beyond understanding. You don't need to be (as they say) a brain surgeon.

In spite of its vast size, the Internet is not yet "intelligent" in the way our individual brains are, but this is perhaps a hint that Hawkins will not be cooking up a general-purpose machine any time soon.

In spite of the specific failings of Hawkins' theory, there are enough promising elements in it for me to pursue what makes sense and leave aside a few specifics. Hawkins is a perfect example of the importance of asking impertinent questions.

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Hawkins' conversation with Sam Harris

Hawkin's conversation with Lex Fridman