Launch

Just learned that my article introducing The Memory Prediction Theater is going to be published by Science and Consciousness Review. I feel very grateful. I'm not a scientist. I'm a software developer with an interest in AI. I've always been drawn to the subject of consciousness, but never seriously approached it until I tried to imagine how to create a piece of software that could pass the Turing Test. I needed a model of human cognition. What was the best model science had produced? That became my driving question.

The question soon led me to Bernard Baars and Global Workspace. I read Baars for a couple weeks, becoming increasingly consumed, especially by the theater model he used to elaborate Global Workspace. I was just starting to really dig into the work of Stan Franklin, Baars' computer science colleague at the University of Memphis, who's developed a "conscious" software agent based on Global Workspace, when an epiphany occurred.

I happened to see something on Steve Jurvetson's blog that caught my eye. He said he'd been reading Jeff Hawkins' new book. If Steve was reading it, I thought I'd better check it out. I googled, one-clicked and was immersed within two days. I devoured the book. Easy to read. Absolutely brilliant. Totally original. The basic problem of consciousness, what Hawkins calls intelligence, solved.

Stunned, I immediately began to wonder how this Memory Prediction Framework of Hawkins' might play out in Baars' Theater of Consciousness. That's how the MPT came into being. That was November of last year. I realized today, on hearing that SCR was going to publish the hypothesis, I might be getting some questions on it, so decided to launch this blog.