Three hundred million pattern processors may sound like a large number, and indeed it was sufficient to enable Homo sapiens to develop verbal and written language, all of our tools, and other diverse creations. These inventions have built upon themselves, giving rise to the exponential growth of the information content of technologies as described in my law of accelerating returns. No other species has achieved this. As I discussed, a few other species, such as chimpanzees, do appear to have a rudimentary ability to understand and form language and also to use primitive tools. They do, after all, also have a neocortex, but their abilities are limited due to its smaller size, especially of the frontal lobe. The size of our own neocortex has exceeded a threshold that has enabled our species to build ever more powerful tools, including tools that can now enable us to understand our own intelligence. Ultimately our brains, combined with the technologies they have fostered, will permit us to create a synthetic neocortex that will contain well beyond a mere 300 million pattern processors. Why not a billion? Or a trillion?
The Structure of a Pattern
The pattern recognition theory of mind that I present here is based on the recognition of patterns by pattern recognition modules in the neocortex. These patterns (and the modules) are organized in hierarchies. I discuss below the intellectual roots of this idea, including my own work with hierarchical pattern recognition in the 1980s and 1990s and Jeff Hawkins (born in 1957) and Dileep George’s (born in 1977) model of the neocortex in the early 2000s.
Each pattern (which is recognized by one of the estimated 300 million pattern recognizers in the neocortex) is composed of three parts. Part one is the input, which consists of the lower-level patterns that compose the main pattern. The descriptions for each of these lower-level patterns do not need to be repeated for each higher-level pattern that references them. For example, many of the patterns for words will include the letter “A.” Each of these patterns does not need to repeat the description of the letter “A” but will use the same description. Think of it as being like a Web pointer. There is one Web page (that is, one pattern) for the letter “A,” and all of the Web pages (patterns) for words that include “A” will have a link to the “A” page (to the “A” pattern). Instead of Web links, the neocortex uses actual neural connections. There is an axon from the “A” pattern recognizer that connects to multiple dendrites, one for each word that uses “A.” Keep in mind also the redundancy factor: There is more than one pattern recognizer for the letter “A.” Any of these multiple “A” pattern recognizers can send a signal up to the pattern recognizers that incorporate “A.”
The second part of each pattern is the pattern’s name. In the world of language, this higher-level pattern is simply the word “apple.” Although we directly use our neocortex to understand and process every level of language, most of the patterns it contains are not language patterns per se. In the neocortex the “name” of a pattern is simply the axon that emerges from each pattern processor; when that axon fires, its corresponding pattern has been recognized. The firing of the axon is that pattern recognizer shouting the name of the pattern: “Hey guys, I just saw the written word ‘apple.’”
Three redundant (but somewhat different) patterns for “A” feeding up to higher-level patterns that incorporate “A.”
The third and final part of each pattern is the set of higher-level patterns that it in turn is part of. For the letter “A,” this is all of the words that include “A.” These are, again, like Web links. Each recognized pattern at one level triggers the next level that part of that higher-level pattern is present. In the neocortex, these links are represented by physical dendrites that flow into neurons in each cortical pattern recognizer. Keep in mind that each neuron can receive inputs from multiple dendrites yet produces a single output on an axon. That axon, however, can then in turn transmit to multiple dendrites.
To take some simple examples, the simple patterns on the next page are a small subset of the patterns used to make up printed letters. Note that every level constitutes a pattern. In this case, the shapes are patterns, the letters are patterns, and the words are also patterns. Each of these patterns has a set of inputs, a process of pattern recognition (based on the inputs that take place in the module), and an output (which feeds to the next higher level of pattern recognizer).
Southwest to north-central connection:
Southeast to north-central connection:
Horizontal crossbar:
Leftmost vertical line:
Concave region facing south:
Bottom horizontal line:
Top horizontal line:
Middle horizontal line:
Loop constituting upper region:
The above patterns are constituents of the next higher level of pattern, which is a category called printed letters (there is no such formal category within the neocortex, however; indeed, there are no formal categories).
“A”:
Two different patterns, either of which constitutes “A,” and two different patterns at a higher level (“APPLE” and “PEAR”) of which “A” is a part.
“P”:
Patterns that are part of the higher-level pattern “P.”
“L”:
Patterns that are part of the higher-level pattern “L.”
“E”:
Patterns that are part of the higher-level pattern “E.”
These letter patterns feed up to an even higher-level pattern in a category called words. (The word “words” is our language category for this concept, but the neocortex just treats them only as patterns.)
“APPLE”:
In a different part of the cortex is a comparable hierarchy of pattern recognizers processing actual images of objects (as opposed to printed letters). If you are looking at an actual apple, low-level recognizers will detect curved edges and surface color patterns leading up to a pattern recognizer firing its axon and saying in effect, “Hey guys, I just saw an actual apple.” Yet other pattern recognizers will detect combinations of frequencies of sound leading up to a pattern recognizer in the auditory cortex that might fire its axon indicating, “I just heard the spoken word ‘apple.’”
Keep in mind the redundancy factor—we don’t just have a single pattern recognizer for “apple” in each of its forms (written, spoken, visual). There are likely to be hundreds of such recognizers firing, if not more. The redundancy not only increases the likelihood that you will successfully recognize each instance of an apple but also deals with the variations in real-world apples. For apple objects, there will be pattern recognizers that deal with the many varied forms of apples: different views, colors, shadings, shapes, and varieties.