Hi dude,
Yes this is good; I've been recommending him over in the thread 'open source watch'.

I see the ralationship between creativity & imagination thus: all imagination is creative; it has to be in order for us to perceive, we have to 'create' an image. Humans create images constantly, and I realize not everyone may call this creativity but it literally is.

We usually think of creativity as making things or thinking up new ideas or solving problems. But everything we perceive, we have created.

Hawkins is possibly using the term 'creativity' instead of 'imagination' because of the negative correlations of imagination with 'fantasy & hallucination'. People are going to find it hard to grasp that we hallucinate everything we see; it's just that usually our hallucinations conform to reality.

Whilst I totally agree with his comment, "We predict the future by analogy to the past." I would add, "And we predict what's most likely going on in the present by analogy to both."
Best,
AR

Hawkins' original TED talk on why we don't have a good brain theory first got me interested because he was blowing away a lot of myths and cutting to the chase.

I'm hoping to expand some of those 'missing parts' in tutorials too, (and since SO much more has been discovered since ICMM, there is a profusion of missing parts!)

I would definitely point anyone interested in AI in Hawkins' direction rather than any other right now. Apart from anything else he is an excellently clear demonstrator and manages to maintain simplicity when describing some horribly complex things and thus pack a shitload of information into a short talk or article. I know he sometimes lectures as though he is in a terrific hurry  :  )  but the enthusiasm shines through. 

Since the ground rules behind the emergence of modularity were cracked,* I prophecy some interesting results from Hawkins real soon. Kevin Kelly makes a good point in that systems have to go 'out of control' at some point during their development, and I don't know much about AI so feel free to educate me, but I feel Hawkins is 'doing things in the right order' and putting down some really solid foundations here.

Best,
AR

* About last Wednesday:  Jeff Clune, Jean-Baptiste Mouret and Hod Lipson "The evolutionary origins of modularity", http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.2743v1.pdf  11 July 2012

Hi folks,
Loads of bits:

Re:
http://www.creativitypost.com/technolog … f_creativi

Love this: "Try to program a computer to find similarities between objects such as pianos and vibraphones and you will see how incredibly difficult this is".
...How about we don't try this, but just believe him?  :  )

Re: "Our predictions, and thus our talents, are built upon our experiences." This is a most important line for me because in NH the relevant thing is, we are still having experiences NOW and it's using input control on our own experiences that builds the 'we' of tomorrow.  Hawkins' words: " The more you are exposed to certain patterns, the more the memory of these patterns are re-formed at lower levels." is a technical version of GR3, "we will become more like whatever we are surrounded by".

Rather than 'patterns on top of patterns' I'd say 'patterns within patterns', as we're favoring the fractal design rather than a linear hierarchy.

"women tend to have thicker cables connecting the left and right sides of the brain then man do" isn't true outside of western societies, (nor is the predominant high-density N5).
...And finally, analogy is N3's 'favorite' context. But every network has its own. N4's, for example, is metaphoric language & math, and N5's of course is the formal language of science. They are just different ways of representing concepts. N3 'likes' analogy because many of its processes are comparative (similar/different...looks a bit more like this, less like that...) Analogy is analog representation of data. Metaphor, math and formal language take us into digital representation of the same data.
Re:
http://www.amazon.com/Predictions-Brain … 0195395514
Sounds like waffle to me, but I don't like anthologies, as you normally get one or two really great chapters and the rest is 'filler'. From the summary immediately I think, how come they don't know there is absolutely no doubt that the brain is modular. It probably couldn't even have evolved this far if it wasn't; non-modular systems are much harder to evolve.

The questions: How are experiences coded optimally to afford using them for predictions? How do we construct a new simulation from separate memories? How specific in detail are future-oriented thoughts, and when do they rely on imagery, concepts or language?

...I hope have been covered adequately in T9, although the last question isn't very coherent. All thoughts rely on imagery and concepts, only frontal lobe processes use language of various kinds.
On to the juicy bits: Sakiro wrote: "it seems like being intelligence or understand stuff fast, is just a matter of fill that database with more and more and more congruent concepts so you have a better/more chances to come along with a percept who match "close enough" with a concept already know .. ?? "
Yes that's a great strategy, but we have to use the processes regulatly too (or its like having a massive library and never reading.)
[s] i wonder if having a strong imagination (even if you don't have a big database to compare) can apply "tricks" to find the similarities (enough points in common) to a percept? and that's where exercises like making analogys or Metaphor, and mind-maps can help to achieve that?

Yes
[s] i interpret that like in a very low level everything we could learn has in the first place enough points of common to at least, associate with our eidetic cores concepts. And that's where it can play a rol when we do the exercises to associate everything to the core concepts explained in tutorials?

Yes
[s] if other one have less concepts, but a stronger imagination, could learn things faster that the other because he is more "sensible" to associate stuff with the core concepts easier/faster??
Yes
[s] which probably happens unconscious in the first place ..
Yes
[s] I know that i'm taking an approach very related to the rear side of the brain
So is N3, because most of it lives there. We have already 'got' a lot of patterns unconsciously.
[s] i'm interested in this specific part which are very heavy dependent of the stuff we are learning in the last tutorial; imagination/prediction/concepts/eiditic cores/ and the mind inner model.

T9 is like, one section away fom finished. Should I put it up without the exercises/hacks section and finish it online? )you won't have any references or answers to puzzles, so that could be a laugh) but you'll have the info?
Best,
AR

Yes Alex, I would say put up the 9th Tutorial.  It seems like finishing the tutorial "online" might be good.  Could make the finished product have more influence from our feedback. 

Looking forward!

D.

Only just caught up with this!

Agree it is absolutely brilliant, (and yes for 'Time 2', read 'duration/tenacity'  :  )

The last few minutes so perfectly describes those teacher/parent/'middle management' creativity-squashing characters we've all encountered so many times, I laughed my ass off  :  )
Thanks for a really fun morning!
Best,
AR

Good morning dude  :  )

Re: is anyone apart from him (and us?) who is using that model to explain intelligence?


Others coming in from the 'emergence' direction: Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen; “Figments of Reality” and “The Collapse of Chaos”. And Stephen Johnson's “Emergence” is pretty good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Joh … 8author%29
I haven't read “Mind Wide Open” yet but would like to.

Other areas: Bruce Lipton has the proteomics mechanics here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLZ7GqWpEqM
...Bruce is slightly woo-woo and that can be offputting, but his biology is right on the mark.

In AI, IBM's latest neuromorphic attempt here: http://www.modha.org/blog/SC12/RJ10502.pdf
But much more exciting is the little project nobody's gonna hear about; “Spaun”:
http://uwaterloo.ca/stories/spaun-offer … an-brain-0
http://nengo.ca/build-a-brain/spaunvideos
Source: Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/simulated-br … S-20121204


We've probably done the most coherent work on emotional function and applications theory; what's holding that up is the lack of distinction between emotion & sentiment. Unless it's categorized thusly, it's not going to make sense. Dan Goleman did some good work in “Emotional Intelligence” but made the exact same error, and his attempts to categorize emotion don't work very well.

On the software theory front, "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson is well worth a read.

Time and resources are never wasted playing with ideas. Sure, most of what we find out is how not to do things (like Edison discovering 2,000 ways not to build a light bulb)   :  )  but with no trial and error things take a lot longer to come to fruition.
Best,
AR

Hi dude,
Mad busy day, please forgive if this mail sounds abrupt!
You wrote:  if we have fear .. maybe we can gain some "extra" power/speed in your muscles (flight and fight response)

F/F response is triggered by the emotions of defensiveness/offence/antipathy; NOT by fear, although alarm will almost certainly be present. Fear triggers panic and loss of control, antipathy triggers our fine tuned muscular response in situations where there literally is no time to think (so no need for frontal lobes!) It's an emergency automatic response that saves our lives, whereas fear only puts us into greater danger.

A lot of people think alarm and/or antipathy IS fear, because they've never experienced the difference. The difference is obvious in behavior: antipathy prompts fight/flight, fear prompts panic, running around aimlessly, passing out, or freezing and crapping our pants.

If a threat is not immediate, we don't need antipathy but just alarm. We can think more clearly when alarmed because all our senses go on red alert and concentrate really hard, priming for possibilities. We see things like the stick on the ground that 'might' be used as a weapon. If in a group, we try to warn our friends silently by signing or verbally with call signs. This is the state of alarm.
Alarm is normal, and most people who feel alarm don't feel fear even though they think/believe/have been told that's what they're feeling. Real fear causes a shock response, and it kills.

I realize this is based on the 'optimal model' of mature intelligence, and part of that maturation is controlling such automatic responses and using our emotional system adeptly. So fear is absolutely normal in an inexperienced brain, which is why many student doctors pass out in their first surgical observations. But note they don't carry on passing out, or no operation could ever get done. We mature by learning to overcome anxious reactions and using healthy interactions.

It's just the same as chucking our food all over ourselves is absolutely normal if we're two years old. Maturity is about mental control as well as physical control, but society has lost track of that fact. We are constantly told, “We can't help it, its just our nature”. When sadly our very nature IS to 'help it'. We should be able to 'run' whichever emotion we decide we prefer, simply by naming it as being so.

Maybe this seems a bit vague without tutorial 10, if so I apologize; it's coming. It's also difficult breaking ground where there is no precedent for the model  :  )  and nobody has tried to explain this before. So we will have to take it slow with lots of feedback. We have all the jigsaw puzzle pieces, and as a system it makes sense. For me, explaining it coherently is now the challenge  LOL  :  )
Best,
AR