(2018-04-28) Forte A Pattern Recognition Theory Of Mind

Tiago Forte: A Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind - Praxis

many of the capabilities of the human mind can be extended and amplified now, using standard, off-the-shelf hardware and software.

In this article I summarize some of Kurzweil’s arguments, and draw lessons for our understanding of Personal Knowledge Management today

In 2012 Ray Kurzweil released How to Create a Mind

our memories are organized in discrete segments

are sequential

memories are nested

Now put these three characteristics together. Which structure best describes nested segments organized in sequential order? A hierarchy

Language evolved to take advantage of the hierarchical structure of our brains. Every concept is made up of smaller concepts, all the way down to the most fundamental ideas. We call this array of recursively linked concepts our “conceptual hierarchy.”

But why would our brains have evolved to be hierarchical before language? Because reality itself is hierarchical

if human cognition is hierarchical, what are these hierarchies made up of? Patterns.

Massively parallel pattern recognition

The way our brains work is through massively parallel pattern recognition. And the organ that has evolved to perform this activity is the neocortex.

The neocortex

For our purposes, the most important thing to understand about the neocortex is that it has an extremely uniform structure

Pattern Recognizers (PRs)

We’ll call these cortical mini-columns Pattern Recognizers, or PRs for short.

The basic structure of a PR has three parts: the input, the name, and the output.

We create the world as we discover the world

The neocortex is not just recognizing the world. It is always attempting to predict what will happen next, moment by moment. If it expects something strongly enough, the recognition threshold may be so low that it fires even when the full pattern is not present. This is the neurological basis for how our narratives become our reality

This is the neurological basis for blindspots. If you don’t expect to see opportunities, upsides, or possibilities, you will become less likely to recognize even the ones that do show up.

The basic unit of human cognition

the basic unit of cognition is not the neuron, but the cortical mini-column (i.e. pattern recognizer).

In this model, learning is not a matter of reconfiguring or building physical structures (which would be difficult and energy-intensive). It is a matter of connectivity between highly uniform pattern recognizers

We are the sum of our connectivity

Takeaways

We can build a second brain

we already have multiple brains. As I’ve written about previously, we have always extended our cognition into our tools and our environment

Our minds have a turning radius (or transaction cost)

There is a limit to how fast you can switch tasks, because changing context requires “desaturating” the neurons before resaturating them with other thoughts.

These cognitive transaction costs can be understood as a “turning radius.” The more patterns you have loaded up into multiple levels of your hierarchy, the faster you can make progress, as you recognize patterns everywhere and everything seems to connect to everything else.

Smaller batch sizes are powerful, but does this mean we should be working in 30-second chunks? No. The bottom limit of our work sessions is defined by our mental transaction costs

Desired outcomes are lenses

This model could also explain the neurological basis of the law of attraction, the belief that “by focusing on positive or negative thoughts people can bring positive or negative experiences into their life.” Setting an intention or formulating a desired outcome is not just wishful thinking.

There is effectively infinite information we could take in through our senses, and therefore an infinite number of interpretations of what it means.

Randomness is a feature

Cortical mini-columns have been found to be so tightly interwoven, that they “leak” action potentials into each other. This is a feature, allowing us to think thoughts outside the strictly logical (like in art, music, dance, etc.).

The purpose of RandomNote is to allow even notes in different notebooks to encounter each other. The purpose of Progressive Summarization is to allow ideas and phrases to stay in their raw form for as long as possible, where they remain available for “mixing” into a wider variety of “idea recipes.”

The role of our biological brain will be as an “expert manager”

I think we’ll increasingly see a “division of cognition” where we outsource subject matter knowledge to external systems, but keep our own common sense and general knowledge in the captain’s chair

The mind as computer