Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Jeff Hawkins

Quote by Jeff Hawkins

“To hold on to a false model, such as a flat Earth, requires dismissing evidence that conflicts with your model. Flat-Earth believers say they distrust all evidence that they cannot directly sense. A picture can be fake. An explorer's account can be fabricated. Sending people to the moon in the 1960s could have been a Hollywood production. If you limit what you believe to only things you can directly experience, and you are not an astronaut, then a flat-Earth model is what you end up with. To maintain a false model, it also helps to surround yourself with other people who have the same false beliefs, thus making it more likely that the inputs you receive are consistent with your model. Historically, this entailed physically isolating yourself in a community of people with similar beliefs, but today you can achieve a similar result by selectively watching videos on the internet.”

Quote by Jeff Hawkins

Work

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Jeff Hawkins
Jeff Hawkins

Jeff Hawkins, born on June 1, 1957, is an influential entrepreneur and inventor in the fields of artificial intelligence and neuroscience. He is renowned for his pioneering work in neural networks and cognitive computing. more

You May Also Like

“We face a dilemma. 'We' -- the intelligent model of ourselves residing in the neocortex -- are trapped. We are trapped in a body that not only is programmed to die but is largely under the control of an ignorant brute, the old brain. [...] We try to control our old brain's destructive and divisive impulses, but so far we have not been able to do this entirely. Many countries on Earth are still ruled by autocrats and dictators whose motivations are largely driven by their old brain: wealth, sex, and alpha-male-type dominance. The populist movements that support autocrats are also based on old-brain traits such as racism and xenophobia.”

“This striving to help save the world a little bit, to push it just a bit farther into the right—this action was the only thing that sustained her during the hard times [when] only her purposeful life propped her up from total collapse, and she thought how strange that she had taught the morality play Everyman all those years but didn’t fully understand its central lesson or how true it was: We are our good deeds, and they alone will come with us into the afterlife.”

“What mystery novels need are – some might call me old-fashioned – a great detective, a mansion, a shady cast of residents, bloody murders, impossible crimes and never-before-seen tricks played by the murderer. Call it my castle in the sky, but I’m happy as long as I can enjoy such a world. But always in an intellectual manner.”