I finally got around to looking at some of this stuff on Jeff Hawkins and his Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) that people have been sending me.  Hawkins is trying to build a biologically plausible model of learning and memory in the brain that will supposedly be general across different tasks (i.e. it works for vision processing, audio, motor stuff, etc).  What he has come up with is called an HTM, and it is a hierarchical network of nodes that use belief propagation.  Here is a video from 2003 where Hawkins lays out some of his ideas about the brain and his belief that intelligence is better defined as an ability to predict the future.  This video is from 2006 and is a presentation were Hawkins describes the theory and implementation of the HTM system.

I think the idea of the HTM system is very cool.  I really think we should be looking to the brain for ideas on good learning and memory systems and doing it hierarchically makes a lot of sense.  The system Hawkins shows seems to be like a sort of hierarchical structure of Self-Organizing Maps (SOM), which is a method for unsupervised learning and clustering.  His method connects these different nodes using belief propagation so they all agree on the same thing.  And he has some unspecified method for detecting temporal sequences.  But otherwise it seems a lot like a SOM, grouping similar sets of inputs together and being able to provide the closest matching set from memory.  The results he shows on a simple object recognition task look very much like something you would see from a SOM or neural network.  It would be cool to see some results where the temporal sequencing or the hierarchical structure come into play.

Even though I think the results of the work are a bit weak so far, I still think it is pretty cool.  I’m still trying to figure out what direction I want to go in for my research and this gives me some ideas.  I would definitely like to work on something motivated by or inspired by the brain.  And it should be general enough to be applicable to many different problems.  It will be interesting to see what kind of results Hawkins gets out of the HTM as it gets extended and applied to more interesting problems.

There was an interesting article by Andrian Kreye in the Edge this week on religion and reason.  Specifically it discusses some of the scientific research into faith that has been going on and has been mostly ignored by the “militant atheists” Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett.  Kreye discusses research by Scott Atran, who wondered what benefit religion had that made us pay such a cost in time and effort and lives to try to overpower rational explanations.  His conclusion is that religion must have had some evolutionary benefits such as the closer communities it can build.  Justin Barrett has done research showing that faith may be important developmentally, as small children have unwavering faith in their mother’s infallibility when they are young.

I thought the most interesting part of the article was its conclusion, which said:

“One advantage faith has over atheism is that it offers hope for an afterlife. Thus far, we have found only religious answers to assuage the fear of death. It always comes down to a choice between delusion and reality. Reality just may make you love your life so much more.”

This echoes something I have tried to say in previous blog posts on religion but I don’t think I was ever able to state it as clearly or eloquently as this.  It may be more difficult to accept the shortness of our lives than the afterlife promised by religions but I think understanding reality allows us to appreciate and live our lives that much better than living it for some supposed afterlife.

Yet another interesting article in the New York Times science section, this one on wasting time at work.  Some research shows that a lot of problem solving and thinking through problems actually goes on subconsciously.  A lot of times you are actually better off surfing the web or relaxing than trying to pound your head against some problem.  You just need to take some time away from the problem so your subconscious can figure it out.  So time spent surfing the web or napping or playing foosball can actually be productive.  If you are a “knowledge worker” then you’re really working subconsciously all the time and perhaps we shouldn’t worry as much about how much time we spent physically working.  Personally, I can’t count how many times I have had some frustrating problem that I can’t figure out, and then I go home to sleep and wake up in the morning with the solution in my head.  I think this research means that work and school should have more time for napping.

There was an interesting article on memory the other week in the New York Times.  Basically, people who are faster at remembering certain things are also the ones who forget other things the fastest.  So the key to a shart memory is actually being selective and only remembering what is important.  Now I finally have an excuse for my terrible movie memory (I generally can’t even remember the plot of a movie the day after I see it).  But by not remembering movies, I am much better at remembering things I learned in class or readings.  Maybe that’s not a bad trade-off…

I recently read Republican Presidential candidate Sam Brownback’s op-ed in the New York Times explaining why he doesn’t believe in evolution. I have so many problems with it that I don’t know where to start. I think this whole evolution debate is very similar to the debate over whether the Earth revolved around the sun in the 1500s. It’s so important to some people that we be “special” and have a place at the center of the universe. In the previous debate, hundreds of years ago, they literally believed that we were at the center of the universe. And no matter how much evidence there was, people wanted to believe we were at the center of the universe. The same thing is going on today. It’s very hard for some people to accept that we’re not “special” and that we weren’t place here by “God” for some special purpose. I’m not really sure why people think this takes so much away from us. So we randomly evolved. Is that so terrible? We should just enjoy the fact that we’re here and savor every instant of our lives.

To go specifically into Sam Brownback’s op-ed, he makes a number of points that bother me. First he claims that “Faith supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose. More than that, faith — not science — can help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love.” So apparently without faith we can’t understand suffering, love, values, meaning, or purpose? I’m not sure why believing that we evolved instead of being created by some God would prevent us from understanding these things.

Then he goes on to say that evolution isn’t science but philosophy and that any “theory” that says we weren’t created by some guiding intelligence must be false.  Basically Brownback wants to reject the institute of science any time it conflicts with his pre-assumed beliefs.  Science is fine, but if it disagrees with what he believes, then its just “atheistic theology” instead of science.

Finally, Brownback gets the point that I brought up at the beginning of this post, that we must be unique and special. Specifically, he says “The unique and special place of each and every person in creation is a fundamental truth that must be safeguarded. I am wary of any theory that seeks to undermine man’s essential dignity and unique and intended place in the cosmos. I firmly believe that each human person, regardless of circumstance, was willed into being and made for a purpose.” Evolution does not undermine our dignity or uniqueness. We’ve evolved into what we are and we will continue to evolve and I don’t see anything wrong with that. If we were “willed into being and made for a purpose” what was that purpose? I understand how difficult it can be to accept reality and understand that we evolved. But it doesn’t make us any less special or mean we have any less capacity to love or suffer or find meaning in life. I would much rather believe and understand the truth of life and enjoy the great luck we have in being here than believing in a creation by some superior being for an unspecified purpose.