Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #208

Jeff Hawkins is a neuroscientist and cofounder of Numenta, a neuroscience research company. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Codecademy: https://codecademy.com and use code LEX to get 15% off - BiOptimizers: http://www.magbreakthrough.com/lex to get 10% off - ExpressVPN: h

the following is a conversation with jeff hawkins a neuroscientist seeking to understand the structure function and origin of intelligence in the human brain he previously wrote the seminal book on the subject titled on intelligence and recently a new book called a thousand brains which presents a new theory of intelligence that richard dawkins for example has been raving about calling the book quote brilliant and exhilarating i can’t read those two words and not think of him saying it in his british accent quick mention of our sponsors codecademy bio optimizers expressvpn a-sleep and blinkist check them out in the description to support this podcast as a side note let me say that one small but powerful idea that jeff hawkins mentions in his new book is that if human civilization were to destroy itself all of knowledge all our creations will go with us he proposes that we should think about how to save that knowledge in a way that long outlives us whether that’s on earth in orbit around earth or in deep space and then to send messages that advertise this backup of human knowledge to other intelligent alien civilizations the main message of this advertisement is not that we are here but that we were once here this little difference somehow was deeply humbling to me that we may with some non-zero likelihood destroy ourselves and that an alien civilization thousands or millions of years from now may come across this knowledge store and they would only with some low probability even notice it not to mention be able to interpret it and the deeper question here for me is what information in all of human knowledge is even essential does wikipedia capture it or not at all this thought experiment forces me to wonder what are the things we’ve accomplished and are hoping to still accomplish that will outlive us is it things like complex buildings bridges cars rockets is it ideas like science physics and mathematics is it music and art is it computers computational systems or even artificial intelligence systems i personally can’t imagine that aliens wouldn’t already have all of these things in fact much more and much better to me the only unique thing we may have is consciousness itself and the actual subjective experience of suffering of happiness of hatred of love if we can record these experiences in the highest resolution directly from the human brain such that aliens will be able to replay them that is what we should store and send as a message not wikipedia but the extremes of conscious experiences the most important of which of course is love this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with jeff hawkins we previously talked over two years ago do you think there’s still neurons in your brain that uh remember that conversation that uh remember me and got excited like there’s a lex neuron in your brain that just like finally has a purpose i do remember our conversation or i have some memories of it and i formed additional memories of you in the meantime um i wouldn’t say there’s a neuron or a neurons in my brain that know you there are synapses in my brain that have formed that reflect my knowledge of you and the model i have of you in the world and whether the exact same synapses were formed two years ago it’s hard to say because these things come and go all the time but we know from one thing to know about brains is that when you think of things you often erase the memory and rewrite it again so yes but i have a memory of you and i have that’s instantiated in synapses there’s a simpler way to think about it like so you have we have a model of the world in your head and that model is continually being updated i updated this morning you offered me this water you said it was from the refrigerator i remember these things and so we and so the model includes where we live the places we know the words the objects in the world it’s a monstrous model and it’s constantly being updated and people are just part of that model so we’re animals or other physical objects so our events we’ve done so um it’s there’s no special in my mind special place for the memories of humans i mean obviously i know you know i know a lot about my wife um but and friends uh and so on but it’s not like a special place for humans over here but we model everything and we model other people’s behaviors too so if i said you’re a copy of your mind in my mind it’s just because i know how humans i’ve learned how humans behave and um and i’ve learned some things about you and that’s part of my world model well i just also mean the collective intelligence of the human species i wonder if there’s something fundamental to the brain that enables that so modeling other humans with their ideas you’re actually jumping into a lot of big topics like collective intelligence is a separate topic that a lot of people like to talk about we can talk about that uh but um and so that’s interesting like you know we’re not just individuals we live in society and so on but from our research point of view and so again let’s just talk we study the neocortex it’s a sheet of neural tissue it’s about 75 of your brain it runs on this very repetitive algorithm it’s a very repetitive circuit and so you can apply that algorithm to lots of different problems but it’s all underneath it’s the same thing we’re just building this model so from our point of view we wouldn’t look for these special circuit someplace buried in your brain that might be related to other you know understanding of the humans it’s more like you know how do we build a model of anything how do we understand anything in the world and humans are just another part of the things we understand so there’s nothing uh there’s nothing to the brain that knows the emergent phenomena of collecting the intelligence well i certainly know about that i’ve heard the terms i’ve read no but that’s right right well okay right as an idea well i think we have language which is is sort of built into our brains and that’s a key part of collective intelligence so there are some you know prior assumptions about the world we’re going to live in when we’re born we’re not just a blank slate um and so you know did we evolve to take advantage of those situations yes but again we study only part of the brain the neocortex there’s other parts of the brain are very much involved in societal interactions and human emotions and um and how we interact and even societal um issues about you know how we are how we interact with other people when we support them when we’re greedy and things like that i mean certainly the brain is a great place where to study intelligence i wonder if it’s the fundamental uh atom of intelligence well i would say it’s it’s it’s absolutely an essential component even if you believe in collective intelligence as um hey that’s where it’s all happening that’s what we need to study which i don’t believe that by the way i think it’s really important but i don’t think that is the thing um but even if you do believe that then you have to understand how the brain works in doing that um it’s you know it’s more like we are intelligent and we are intelligent individuals and together we are much more magnified our intelligence we can do things that we couldn’t do individually but even as individuals we’re pretty damn smart and we can model things and understand the world and interact with it so um to me if you’re going to start some place you need to start with the brain then you could say well how do brains interact with each other and what is the nature of language and how do we