The Secret of Human Thought Revealed - How to Create a Mind

"As the most important phenomenon in the universe, intelligence is capable of transcending natural limitations, and of transforming the world in its own image. In human hands, our intelligence has enabled us to overcome the restrictions of our biological heritage and to change ourselves in the process. We are the only species that does this."

Ray Kurzweil: How to Create a Mind; the Secret of Human Thought Revealed

Proposition: Anybody who reads, studies and reflects deeply on Ray Kurzweil's "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed" will never think the same again. The person who opens the book and follows his argument closely cannot be the person who lays it down. He or she, even against their will, if honest will be in some intellectual turmoil because Kurzweil overturns many fundamentals of contemporary conventions on thinking. His title tells it all: He is determined to pursue the secrets of human brains and reproduce these through Artificial Intelligence.

Kurzweil's ideas are so revolutionary that a prior look at his credentials is useful . He wrote his first computer program aged fifteen and sold it for half million dollars. He was the inventor of the first music synthesizer capable of reproducing the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, the CCD flat-bed scanner, the first optical character recognition for all fonts, the first print-to-speech synthesizer and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. A millionaire many times over, he has received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in the White House in 2002. The Wall Street Journal called him the "restless genius," Forbes labeled him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison" and PBS included him as one of the sixteen "revolutionaries who made America" in the past two centuries.

Truth in advertizing: No review of this length can possibly explore satisfactorily the mega complexities of Kurzweil's thought. Kurzweil explores the human mind, determining how it functions, and then relates this to the enormous advances in computer technology. He sets this out clearly in two comparative chapters, "The Biological Neocortex," and "The Biological Inspired Digital Neocortex.""The goal of the project is to understand precisely how the human brain works, and then to use these revealed methods to better understand ourselves, to fix the brain when needed, and--most relevant to the subject of this book--to create even more intelligent machines." Already in his previous best-selling book, "The Singularity is Near," he predicts with great confidence the not-too-distant point at which artificial intelligence will surpass human capabilities, and many computer scientists agree. Kurzweil wants to reverse-engineer the brain, and to do this he begins with an examination how the brain thinks, before then moving on to artificial intelligence and the world of computers.

Kurzweil offers a number of provocative "thoughts on thinking" in introducing his study of the brain. He describes how he has been `thinking about thinking' since the age of twelve and some of the insights this provided. For instance, most people can recite the alphabet, but fail when they try to do it backwards. To Kurzweil this demonstrates our memories are sequential. "They can be accessed only in the order that they are remembered." Next Kurzweil asks that we reconstruct our afternoon's walk, the people we saw. Few can in any detail, to which Kurzweil comments "...there are no images, videos, or sound recordings stored in our brain. Our memories are stored as sequences or patterns." And it is this "pattern recognition" that Kurzweil finds the true function of the brain.

Kurzweil argues that our memories are stored as sequences of patterns." He calls it his "pattern theory of mind." "Human being have only a weak ability to process logic, but a very deep core capability of recognizing patterns. He illustrates this by quoting chess master Gary Kasparov who attributes his genius to pattern identification. Kasparov apparently thinks like the rest of us one step at a time, has learned 100,000 board positions, that is, patterns. Kurzweil then describes how these patterns (he estimated 300 million are stored in the neo-cortex) are arranged in "hierarchies" in the brain

Although neuroscientists are by no means agreed on how the brain works, Kurzweil believes he has enough evidence to focus almost entirely on the neocortex, which he credits with being able to deal with patterns in hierarchical fashion. The human neocortex is the newest part of the brain, the outermost layer, thin, two-dimensional, about 2.5 milimeters thick. It is intricately folded over the top of the rest of the brain, and accounts for 80% of its weight. Kurzweil offers a standard accepted description of its various functions. The human brain has only weak ability to process logic, but a very deep core capability of recognizing patterns. Such is the centrality of the neocortex in Kurzweil's thinking that he calls other regions of the brain--the amygdale, thalamus, hippocampus and cerebellum--the "old brain" the pre-evolutionary brain, the "one we had before we were mammals," essential for only a few functions. But it was the neo cortex which exponentially accelerated the pace of human learning, from thousands of years to months--"or less" he adds.

Putting on his A-I hat, Kurzweil reviews his own accomplishments- culminating most recently in a program enabling the blind to read in all fonts--as they relate to his theories on thinking. Most computer engineers agree that a computer capable of emulating the technical function of the brain is not too far off. Kurzweil goes further: "Ultimately we will create an artificial neocortex that has the full range and flexibility of its human counterpart. There will be electronic circuits billions of times faster than our biological circuits." "Thinking" will migrate to electronic "clouds," with virtually unlimited capabilities. The system will make possible billions, or even trillions of pattern recognizers, the essence of thought--including the emotions of fear, sadness and pleasure. (Kurzweil doesn't indicate whether the machine will have tear ducts.)

Understandably, there has been some criticism of Kurzweil, most of all for his venture into admittedly bizarre transhumanism in predicting he will be able to talk to his long-deceased (40 years) father. It must be emphasized, however, that he doesn't expect to resurrect his father, merely to create electronic circuitry which can be programmed on all his known characteristics--DNA, RNA, personal qualities, quirks, moods, humor (or not). It's a natural spinoff from his conviction that AI will assume all the qualities of a human being, so that conceivably (with a lot of skepticism) Kurzweil might recreate a robot of his father's qualities. Challenging this facet of his thinking, however, does not basically undercut his other perceptions on thought. Kurzweil also takes some humorous criticism for his admittedly singular health regimen--taking 200 pills daily and having monthly blood transfusions. It remains to be seen who gets the last laugh.

The public has already had something of an introduction to what Kurzweil is projecting in the performance of IBM's computer, universally recognized as "Watson," on the television show Jeopardy in soundly trouncing the best human players ever on the show. In February 2011 (eons ago in digital terms) Watson correctly answered correctly virtually every question, including those including puns, similes and metaphors.Two such questions were: (a) Wanted for a twelve-year crime spree of eating King Hothgar's warriors: officer Beowulf has been assigned the case garment worn by a child, perhaps aboard an operatic ship, and (b) In act three of an 1846 Verdi opera, this Scourge of God is stabbed to death by his love, Odabella. (Watson is not infallible, Watson's performance is beyond belief--and right in the AI direction Kurzweil is projecting. It (or is it "he? she?)) runs on 90 IBM 750 servers with 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,800 processors operating in parallel. It's preloaded with dozens of encyclopedias, news articles, internet connections. It contains all of Wikipedia. This data base is humongous, far beyond the capability of the human brain. Watson scans two million pages in three seconds. Kurzweil bristles at criticism that Watson only works through statistical probabilities rather than "true" understanding. So do humans, he retorts. "One could just as easily dismiss the distributed neurotransmitter concentrations and redundant connection patterns i n the human cortex as `statistical information.'" By 2020, says Kurzweil, "we'll have at least in a routine personal computer type computer (power) about equal to the human brain." "...at today's rate of change," he adds, "we will achieve an amount of progress equivalent to that of the whole 20th century in 14 years."

Regardless of how one judges the multiple facets of Kurzweil's theories, he clearly established two indisputable facts shaping our lives. Research, from neuroscience to psychiatry to physical monitoring through such techniques as MRI imaging, is providing new insights into the biological mind at exponential speeds. Parallel to this, understanding of the digital world is progressing even more rapidly, with the "singularity" point-- where biological brain and the digital world connect--not . And, yes, what if things take a bad turn and the computers get out of hand and turn on their masters, as with "Hal" in "2000: Space Odyssey" who goes berserk and turns on his creators. Ray Kurzweil makes an unassailable case that it's time to begin thinking more profoundly about thinking.far away. Indeed, for most persons the distinction between "I" and "my IPhone" is blurring--the computer virtually a `brain extender' of our selves. Kurzweil describes how when Google shut down he thought "part of my brain was going on strike." It makes clear, "how thoroughly we have already outsourced parts of our thinking to the cloud of computing." Clearly it's time to begin to think through the ramifications of this, everything from robotics to the cyber world

I found this book to be interesting and challenging at the same time. Its difficulty wasn't because of the author's material however was due to my limited ability to understand such profound concepts; perhaps I would do better with a "For Dummies" version. As a result I had to reread many portions over again and still I am not sure if I understood them. This was a pleasant exercise; performed mostly for the joy of exploring the topics whilst attempting to train myself to better comprehend (Kurzweil himself said he has this problem).

What I liked most was about the book was how it changed my understanding of how the brain works. Kurzweil has been `thinking about thinking' since the age of twelve and has developed a theory that our memories and thoughts are simply stored sequences of patterns. He proposes that the brain's neocortex functions as a pattern recognizer; there are no recordings being played back on a screen in our minds. The Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind (PRTM) alone makes this reading worthwhile. I especially enjoyed the reading about neural nets, vector quantization and hidden Markov model. These mathematical techniques are used with an evolutionary genetic algorithm to recognize speech patterns. Kurzweil puts forward that these probability methods can be used as a strategy for creating a mind. These are the portions I had to go over numerous times; I learned something new with each reading however still have more to attempt to comprehend.

After reading this book one can appreciate the good fortune we have to part of this time in the human experience. Consider that over billions of years the universe evolved the brain's neocortex. Initially for the purpose of survival which humanity has now usurped to develop technological tools to pursue our own goals, create our own comforts and amusements. In short cosmological time the human phenomenon of hierarchical pattern recognition will overcome its inherited biological constrictions and become one with the universe. The spark of humanity having climbed out from the primordial slime, gradually developing the tool of pattern identification in the mammalian mind to exponentially emerge as the planets dominant species; ultimately transcending all natural limitations. We then turn to the face of God himself saying, "Thanks, we'll take it from here".

Kurzweil again shows his well thought, but 'out of the box' ideation. I was certainly NOT disappointed. While I cannot attest to the truth of his prognostications, his pat history has been prodigious and well woth further consideration. In this book, his thesis is well defined and worthy of consideration.

Well, it turns out Ray is completely wrong. Apparently he is thinking too high level about the neocortex and fails to look for patterns on the neurons themselves. Since we can image at higher level of detail we can now see the variations in each column and see that there is no pattern as he theorizes. That is unfortunate because it puts the singularity at least 20 years later than he predicted.

Ray has a progressive and optimist way of looking at the world. He uses reason to explain the way our mind and artificial intelligence works deep into neuroscience. His knowledge will dramatically impact the way we see the future. I highly recommend everyone to read this book! *It was just recently released in spanish as well!

There was some good information and a lot of speculation. Perhaps the author is correct in his view of the future, but it seems based on a lot of optimistic assumptions. More facts and a little less enthusiasm would make a better science book.

This another great book written by Ray Kurzweil. It delves into the human mind, the development of technology and the future of how they will come together.

Ray addresses consciousness and morality along the way.

Beautiful, thoughtful book that will cause you to think and smile.

Starting with artificial intelligence and naturally pulling in philosophy, psychology, biology and math to build up to an exciting vision of what it means to be human, the nature of the accelerating progress we are experiencing and an exciting vision of what's next for us as a species (and beyond!).

Kurzweil's main insight is that the neocortex consists of 300 million pattern recognizers. This allows a realistic assessment of the hardware demands of a simulation. It also gives insights into our limitations and how a synthetic neocortex could transcend these limitations.

I noted a few small mistakes in the book:
p236 He claims a hidden variable theory of Quantum Mechanics is possible in principle. As far as I know that is false.
p211 He refers to Susan Blackmore as "Blackburn" which is really just a typo
p288 He claims Lucid Dreaming is half way between dreaming and awake. In fact, Stephen LaBerge has shown that Lucid Dreaming happens in the very deepest stages of REM sleep.

Kurzweil is on the cutting edge of actually trying to create a mind. And I think we can be grateful that he is giving us a window directly into this cutting edge of research.

Pattern recognition is what memory is all about. This book explains the physical structures and wiring involved and feedback loops used automatically adjust the thresholds need to register a pattern as recognized. The book explains the hierarchies involved.

Ray Kurzweil is a genius! This book is an amazing adventure into our soon to be future. It is frightening and enthralling at the same time. If you want to know what happens next, read this book! It is an amazing story full of information about what might be and what will be in the very near future.

The pattern recognizers are exactly what I have allways thought to be the building blocks - and the power to apply certain patterns to new problem areas sometimes completely unrelated is a fact that works well. The musings on what consciousness might or might not be are given late but proper attention and I fully agree that we should embrace the tools that extend our own minds and will in time give "life" to minds not necessarily rooted in biological substrate.

Of course another in Kurzweil's books on working our way to AI good enough to have a mind of its own. To be conscious in the way humans are.

About half the book is explaining PRTM (his pattern recognition theory of the mind). Pretty good explanation in layman's terms of how important pattern matching is in functioning of the mammalian brain. Some of this info is covered in more detail in "On Intelligence". You also get some taste of it in "Reading in the brain: the Science and Evolution of a Human Invention" by Dehaene. One result of this is the mammalian brain is portrayed as a repeated group of pattern matching modules. This book explores that and explains some of the subtle effects that result.

It goes on to some reasonable conjecture about how understanding this has already and will increasingly allow us to artificially in a digital manner accomplish very much the same resulting processing. And then spends the last bit of the book examining whether a machine with human levels of processing ability or beyond will be considered conscious, be accepted by humans as such and what some implications might be. Along with that is the sticky examination of what it means to be conscious even as a human. And finally the author's idea that increasingly we will augment and merge with improved pattern matching abilities to enhance our own rather perhaps than constructing completely stand alone intelligent machines.

All in all a book very much worth reading. Most of his ideas are handled by others elsewhere and are up to date. His isn't a lone far out view of this field. He does mention his own work a bit much for my taste, but then again I suppose he has earned that. I would say, this current book has a tone more down to earth, accessible and less that of a grand utopian vision of the future than his previous books. I think some of it is we are much closer to knowing how the brain works than we were. So less need to guess about what we will find out though no doubt there are still surprises in store for us all.

Kurzweil shows how he uses mathematics to make the "most-likely" determinations of the nature of an unknown. Where there is no way to precisely identify an unknown, Kurzweil tells us in great detail how he arrives at a probabilistic identification that serves the purpose that he has. This is the way he arrived at the computer programs needed to identify printed words for reading to the blind and to convert spoken words to computer language. He proposes to continue this approach until he has satisfactorily translated the complex operations of the human brain into programs that can be applied to computers to emulate and perform the functions of the brain. He clearly and convincingly demonstrates that a computer can be designed to adequately, if not precisely, be a brain.

I am a professional teacher of English language, and a prolific reader of anything that will help me understand this incredible mystery. Ray Kurzweil has taken me further in my quest to understand how we learn and process language than I ever thought possible. I have to admit, that I was ready to read this book, having read Steven Pinker's books, several by Gary Marcus, Larsen-Freeman and others in the field of language acquisition & thought. Kurzweil gets right down to it, and makes the columnar, multilayered perceptrons, (pattern receptors) seem like a Lego construction. If you want to check out just how much Kurzweil has done the heavy lifting for you, look up "columnar structure in the neo cortex" on your browser. Like Richard Dawkins, Kurweil has taken an incredibly complex subject and made it accessible to the educated and persistent reader. I add the 'persistent,' because this book will take some effort, but it is well within the range of most, and the rewards are significant. You will end up knowing an awful lot about what the brain is, how it is structured, and how it processes the input of our daily lives. This is Cape Canaveral for anyone with a yen to understand how the mind does what is does.

Ray Kurzweil is one of the most accessible and intelligent AI researchers out there, despite criticism from skeptics. If you've ever wanted to know when and how computers will be able to think and act like a human, this is a great introduction.

How to Create a Mind, by Ray Kurzweil, may convince you that the human brain is less complicated than it seems at first glance. Rather than a maze of randomly connected neurons, think of the brain as a dense but orderly matrix of identical pattern recognizers (PRs), each consisting of about 100 neurons. These PRs are arranged in five to seven layers, each connected to layers above and below it. Each PR sums the strengths of its input signals and, if the sum is stronger than its threshold value, triggers its output signal. In other words, each PR measures its inputs and decides whether to send an output signal to the next higher layer (and sometimes to other PRs and lower layers). Each layer combines signals from other layers in order to make higher-level decisions.

Kurzweil summarizes the physical evidence for this type of hierarchical organization in the brain and describes how he has used this model to develop computer programs that can accurately scan printed text (OCR), synthesize speech, and interpret human speech. For these tasks, programs based on hierarchical pattern recognition have been shown to work better than other approaches.

The author presents a good discussion of artificial intelligence research and biological experiments that demonstrate that our brains actually work this way. He discusses how human thoughts, decisions and emotions can arise from millions of simultaneously operating pattern recognizers in our brains. He also discusses interesting questions about mental diseases, free will, artistic abilities, and possible limits of artificial intelligence.

If computer speed and memory capacity continue to increase exponentially, as they have in the past, Kurzweil concludes that it will be possible (by the year 2029) for a computer to equal the thinking capabilities of a human mind.

I've worked with heirarchical data structures all of my life and have also considered reality to be recursive, which, if you think about it, is recursive in and of itself.

So, there is much to think about, and Mr. Kurzweil has expertly shone on a light on where might be a good place to look....

Good overview over what we know about the human brain.
Thourough overview over Artificial Intelligence and what remains and when we might be able to get there.
Interesting philosphical discussion around consciousness and free will.

Great and fun and comprehensive reading!

It is both, informafive and interesting from the beginning to the end.
At the top of my favorite books.
It is about the mind (also about, the brain) and about our destiny to conquer the universe faith with it. (Yes, it is wild, but very well fundamented)

Ray Kurzweil es un excelente investigador y cientifico, que escribe perfectamente sus ideas y pensamientos. Para mi este es un nuevo libro suyo super necesario para quien quiera visualizar el futuro de nuestra mente.

Ray Kurzweil es un excelente investigador y cientifico, que escribe perfectamente sus ideas y pensamientos. Para mi este es un nuevo libro suyo super necesario para quien quiera visualizar el futuro de nuestra mente.

Ray Kurzweil writes as an authority on AI (artificial intelligence). As a practitioner in that field myself, I am not impressed by his expertise. He knows one or two subfields of AI well and is a talented inventor, but his vision of the future of AI simply doesn't hold water.

An informed layman who has never read an AI textbook (or history, such as Nils Nilsson's or Pamela McCorduck's) and knows nothing about cognitive neuroscience (see recent books by Michael Gazzaniga and V. S. Ramachandran) may find this book impressive. It is a place where a great deal of mediocre information is contained between two covers. However, I don't think Kurzweil knows enough about human learning (a large and complex field) and human intelligence (ditto) to get a solid handle on what tasks machine learning and machine intelligence must be able to perform and in what order their respective subtasks will probably be mastered.

There are gifted multidisciplinary thinkers in AI and cognitive science who have proved their ability to run rings around Kurzweil, and none of them purports to be a "futurist." Ever since Herbert A. Simon predicted (in 1957) that in a decade the strongest chess player in the world would be a machine (it was four decades before IBM's DEEP BLUE beat World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov in tournament play in May, 1997), serious AI researchers have been very cautious in making predictions about the not-so-near future.

There is an established literature on mind design and Kurzweil has contributed very little to it. This book does not summarize that literature or move it forward. I sincerely doubt it will be remembered five years from now. There are too many good people, from Steven Pinker (who explains the mind for those who aren't experts in it) and John Robert Anderson (one of the experts) to Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland (the latter two being examples of a brave new philosophy of mind), who have made contributions to how minds can realistically be designed for us to waste our time with the mediocre thoughts of "futurists" and others who aren't telling us a believable story about how they will be built.

We already know a great deal more about mind design and implementation than Ray Kurzweil does, a field I was working in more than 30 years ago. To be blunt, Kurzweil isn't plugged into enough of the right sources of information.

Ray Kurzweil is an unusual combination of innovator and inventor with an extraordinary ability to imagine the future. In this book, one really gets to see his expertise in computer simulation of the brain as well as his familiarity with the latest research on the workings of the brain. One emerges from this book with the conviction that humanity is a few decades away from evolving beyond itself. As he describes just how impressive are the workings of the human brain, he shows how these workings can be simulated and eventually surpassed by non-biological technology. The material that he covers is difficult to fully understand on the first read and even after many reads. The field of artificial intelligence has struggled to achieve its goals and many people today are quite ready to dismiss the possibility that they can be achieved. With this book, the path to success is clearly defined even though it is still a few decades away. For those who wonder about his prediction of a full simulation of a human brain in 2029, this book will convince you it really is possible.

While I thought that Jeff Hawkins "On Intelligence" was interesting, it was only marginally readable. On the other hand, Kurzweil's latest book, in addition to being filled with compelling arguments and facts, is eminently readable. Not only is Kurzweil a world class futurist and technologist, he is a very adequate writer. For anyone who is interested the future of AI, this is a must read. Skeptics -- who think human intelligence is a unique facility which can never be mimicked, let alone exceeded, by machines -- will find 'How to Create a Mind' worthwhile.