On a more-or-less monthly schedule, I plan to offer Book Week, a look at one or more books, old and new, technical and non-technical. This week I’m looking at a new theory of intelligence and a biography of Shakespeare.
THE WEEK
The Tempest in Washington DC
This is where I usually post a few news items, often about AI. But this Book Week I just want to inform you that the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC is putting together a permanent Shakespeare exhibit that will, for the first time, display its 82 copies of the First Folio. This the single biggest collection of the world’s 235 surviving copies. The First Folio is the first published collection of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1623.
According to an unimpeachable source, my Cousin David, the Folger is definitely worth a visit.
“Bas-reliefs along the north facade” the Guardian article informs us, “depict scenes from the plays while the interior evokes Tudor England with oak paneling, ornamental floor tile and high plaster ceilings. There is a working theatre, which most recently produced The Winter’s Tale. But, for nearly a century, the precious collection of First Folios was hidden from public view in the library vault.”
Starting in June, these books will be on display for all to see.
But now, let me tell you about this book:
A THOUSAND BRAINS
Jeff Hawkins may have got it exactly right in his new theory of intelligence. Or he may have missed something important. Or what he’s saying may not be as original as it seems. I’m not a neuroscientist and I’m not qualified to decide that. But I am a writer and I am qualified to tell you that A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence is a great read. I recommend it highly.
Richard Dawkins, who wrote the Foreword, agrees: “[I]t is so exhilarating, so stimulating, it’ll turn your mind into a whirling maelstrom of excitingly provocative ideas….”
Wow, huh? So who is Jeff Hawkins? You may associate the name with the PalmPilot, “the first wildly popular handheld computers,” responsible for ushering in the smartphone era. He co-created that line of PDAs (personal digital assistants), which debuted more than a decade before the iPhone was released.
But that business was just a sideline, a detour on his true path. Hawkins has always been focused on understanding how the brain embodies intelligence, a goal he has pursued largely outside the conventional sites: universities or the advanced research labs of the biggest tech companies. Dawkins tentatively places him in the ranks of gentleman scientists, in the model of Darwin.
Because Hawkins, after abortive attempts to work in academia, has pursued his research in his own lab/company, Numenta. Its two-part mission has always been to develop a theory of how the neocortex works and to apply this learning to machine learning and machine intelligence.
Numenta has not ignored academic neuroscience: it draws heavily on published work in the area and contributes to the body of neuroscience research with its own findings. Numenta is not some fringe operation, it could easily be the university-based project of a well-funded professor. It just happens not to have followed that path.
And this has enabled Numenta to track the curiosity of its founder wherever it leads, including to develop optimized transformer networks for AI. Numenta made headlines recently by demonstrating that it could attain performance levels for LLMs running on Intel CPUs that significantly exceed those of a well-known LLM running on dedicated MPUs. This runs counter to the prevailing idea that MPUs are necessary for adequate performance of LLMs. I should clarify the word “demonstrated.” I don’t know that Numenta has shown these results publicly yet, but they have apparently shown them to Intel, who seems convinced.
Like Numenta, the book also tracks the curiosity of its author. While A Thousand Brains contains a popular and understandable presentation of Jeff Hawkins’s theory of intelligence, it is also a book about artificial intelligence. In fact, it’s really three books.
I need to address a potential concern you might have regarding the discussion of AI in the book. This book came out just before ChatGPT brought AI to everyone’s attention. It is tempting to think that everything regarding AI published before November 2022 is obsolete, but that would be a mistake. ChatGPT, for all its social significance and its significance in fueling investment in AI, was just a demo of ideas that had been in circulation for years, and was built largely on open source software, as shown by the fact that multiple companies are competing for the AI dollars with multiple AI products/projects. Jeff Hawkins was well aware of all that went into ChatGPT, and the book shows that.
The first part of the book describes the theory without getting too deep into neuroscience. You’ll learn about cortical columns and reference frames, distributed intelligence, the binding problem, and voting by neurons. On the way to the theory, Hawkins will bring you up to speed on the grounding of his work dating back to pioneering work by Vernon Mountcastle in 1976, in which he basically says that the neocortex is made up of many little units all doing the same thing, and that thinking and intelligence reside in the connections of these simple processing units. These are the cortical columns Hawkins discusses, and the idea of intelligence residing in connections is the grounding of his notion of reference frames.
The second part of the book comes out of Numenta’s work in AI, but really more from what Hawkins thinks about AI. He dives boldly into the big questions: Can machines truly exhibit intelligence? Can they become conscious??Would intelligent machines enslave or kill us? What are the existential risks of AI?
The third part of the book is devoted to a subject that might seem surprising, but shouldn’t be, given Hawkins’s interests: human intelligence. I find it delightful that he titles one chapter “The Existential Risks of Human Intelligence.”
Indeed.
Theories are meant to be tested, and The Thousand Brains theory will be be put to the test. But it is already worth your attention simply because it addresses the big questions, bringing together objective findings that must be part of the story of intelligence. Even if it proves not to be the answer, it is asking all the right questions.
And now for something old.
THE DUSTY SHELF
A Shakespeare Biography
The historian and biographer A.L. Rowse wrote in his diary, intended for publication:
“I don’t want to have my money scalped off me to maintain other people’s children. I don’t like other people; I particularly don’t like their children; I deeply disapprove of their proliferation making the globe uninhabitable. The f***ing idiots — I don’t want to pay for their f***ing.” [Source: The Diaries of AL Rowse, edited by Richard Ollard]
Charming, eh?
Rowse was a great historian of the Elizabethan era, but he was also by all accounts an arrogant, misanthropic, and unpleasant man. In the Preface to his William Shakespeare: A Biography, he boasts:
“It stands to reason that someone who has spent a lifetime studying the period and the social life of Shakespeare’s time should have something to contribute, and for a number of years I have had this book in mind in my researches. All the same, I am overwhelmed by what historical investigation, by proper historical method, has brought to light. It has enabled me to solve, for the first time, and definitively, the problem of….”
And it goes on like that.
I have had that book on my shelf for decades and pull it down every so often to read selections from it, and I am going to recommend that book to you.
Why, you rightly ask?
I am no Shakespeare scholar. In fact, of the 100 or more biographies of Shakespeare, this book, published in 1963, is the only one I’ve ever read. It’s a book that has been criticized for its “lack of documentary evidence for information presented as fact” and for Rowse’s “authoritarian tone and his failure to credit the work of other Shakespearean scholars.” [Encyclopedia Britannica]
So why would I recommend it? Why have I pulled it down from the Dusty Shelf to reread, and to inflict on you?
For all his faults, Rowse was “one of the 20th century’s foremost authorities on Elizabethan England.” [Britannicaagain] His masterpiece is the historical trilogy The Elizabethan Age (1950–72). Its three volumes, entitled The England of Elizabeth, The Expansion of Elizabethan England, and The Elizabethan Renaissance, are widely praised for bringing the era to life.
And that is what I like about his Shakespeare biography. Rowse walks you up the streets of Elizabethan Stratford-upon-Avon. He makes you feel like you are in Shakespeare’s world, and when he is doing this, he doesn’t come across as arrogant or misanthropic. He demonstrates that as a historian, he definitely does have “something to contribute.”
Admittedly, when it comes to detailing the particulars of Shakespeare’s life, Rowse has considerably less to say. But that’s because nobody has much to say about the particulars of Shakespeare’s life. Shakespeare the artist, him we know, but Shakespeare the man is a mystery, with few clues. Most of the biographical material available to any biographer is from dry official records: birth and death notices, his will, real estate and tax records, the establishment of the coat of arms of the family. We don’t even know exactly when he was born, just that he was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564. There are seven critical year’s of Shakespeare’s life when nobody knows where he was or what he was doing. Nobody can write a proper biography of William Shakespeare.
And Rowse hasn’t done it. There is a noticeable lack of Shakespeare in this book. Also, there is a lot of gratuitous speculation about the meaning of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which did nothing for Rowse’s reputation as a historian.
But what Rowse does is to put you in Shakespeare’s world. The descriptions of Stratford and the English countryside are justification enough for the book. Here’s how he brings you into Stratford:
“We come into the town over the fine stone bridge…. The main street of Stratford was, and is, the street ahead of us, Bridge Street, running up to the old market cross at the intersection with the High Street and Henley Street: in Shakespeare’s day the cross was replaced by a more useful covered structure, under which his father had his standing on market days along with the other glovers of the town.”
Several pages are given over to Shakespeare’s regional dialect, deduced from the broader historical record and from the clues in Shakespeare’s own spelling. Rowse wants you to hear Shakespeare’s Warwickshire long u in words like “guns” and “wonder” and “won,” which Shakespeare would have pronounced “goons” and “woonder” and “woone.” And the strongly enunciated consonants and the stronger terminal y and the sound now lost from English that would have had Shakespeare pronounce fruit something like “friwt.”
You’ve seen the speculation, silly in my opinion: Did Shakespeare really write those plays? Many people have found it implausible that this country boy, this commoner, could have acquired the knowledge of English history, and the vocabulary, evident in the plays. Rouse answers them by detailing what a country boy would actually have learned in the well-funded and mandatory grammar school of the day. Shakespeare’s knowledge of history was not that of a scholar, it was the common stories given to all grammar school students, and it wasn’t always correct. As for his vocabulary, it was impressive but he invented a lot of it. The words of Shakespeare have even inspired a book (see below).
Rowse the dogged researcher shows that he can deduce unrecorded influences about Shakespeare’s life from peripheral data. For one example, from public records of payments to touring theater companies visiting Stratford-upon-Avon during Shakespeare’s formative years (1569–1587, age 5 to 23), he shows us that Shakespeare likely had seen performances by as many as five theater companies in a year. Some of these players, interestingly, had served the King of Denmark at Elsinore, and would have had stories to tell of that experience and that court. Two of these players would later be leading associates of Shakespeare in the Lord Chamberlain’s company.
So Shakespeare had access to colorful details to enrich Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. What he did with them, of course, was pure Shakespeare.
Rowse probably thought that the real contribution of his book was his detective work in uncovering the details of the love triangle that inspired the Sonnets. That’s not the opinion of other historians, I gather, but it does make an engaging story.
More Dusty Shelf Shakespeare
Two more fat books on my Shakespeare shelf:
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom. This book is also bombastic, but in support of Shakespeare. Bloom’s thesis is that after Shakespeare, humans had a different concept of what it is to be human. That sort of sets the tone for his analysis of all Shakespeare’s plays. Bloom is authoritative, original, opinionated, provocative, and most of all, he makes you want to read the plays.
Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary & Language Companion, David Crystal and Ben Crystal. Shakespeare may have introduced more new words into the English language than anyone else. This is not a book to just sit down and read, but for me it is more than a reference book. I find it a delightful linguistic pond to dip into for the delight of discovering some Shakespearean word I’d never heard or of learning that yes, that phrase was a Shakespearean invention.
BEFORE YOU GO…
The Pragmatic Bookshelf
Just released:
Programming Ruby 3.3 (5th Edition): The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide.
This is the most complete book on Ruby, covering both the language itself and the standard library as well as commonly used third-party tools.
By Noel Rappin with Dave Thomas.
Blogroll
Kent Beck’s advice for geeks
When We Were Trekkies
Tales from the Jar Side
Tom Lehrer Songs and Lyrics
Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media
Popular Information
Bookshop.org
AI Supremacy
New York Review of Books
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ICYMI
You can read all the 2023 back numbers of Swaine’s World at my blog home.
Coming Attractions
Next week: “The Thankless Child,” a Dirt Road Diary tale.
Image of the Week
Sophie Jo, 2007–2024. Goodbye, sweet girl.