Sanskratio

The article from Business 2.0 (I suppose) titled Jeff Hawkins and the Brain contains an inspiring quote from Bill Atkinson —one of the early designers at Apple Computers:

What Numenta is doing is more fundamentally important to society than the personal computer and the rise of the Internet.

Says the article: "Atkinson pulled himself out of semiretirement to become one of the first outside developers of Numenta software."

There's two instances of myself, the one which I think is my true self which is the ongoing conscious being that's inside my head and the one that leaves traces in written text (and other media), such as in this weblog. I find that the one I think is my true self seems much more intelligent and wise. I'm fine with that, but I feel like it's the intelligence and wisdom of the other me that I should be focusing on. It lags behind on the intelligence and wisdom department, but it's the one that leaves any marks outside of my own brain.

If you know what I mean. (Probably not, because this is the stupider of the two that's actually talking to you.)

I have some free time on my hands and I just spent an hour cleaning up our apartment. An hour might not sound like a big deal, but with two little children those moments of complete solitude are few and far between.

Anyhow, I, in fact, regard this cleaning itself rather pointless. Yeah, one has to clean from time to time and it does bring some sort of satisfaction to have cleaned up. But I might as well have spent the hour doing something completely different, or do nothing at all, and I would have been just as well off. I could have cleaned up later.

So the real reason I devoted that hour to cleaning is that I know that I would have had a little nagging feeling about not cleaning up at all. Maybe I would have cleaned later, who knows, but I sure would have suffered from the nagging voice in my head. Now that I have cleaned, as pointless as the operation itself might have been, I can enjoy doing whatever else I'm going to do without that (irrational) guilty feeling. An hour seems like an appropriate amount to invest to this better feeling in my head.

And it is nice that the apartment is much cleaner now.

I mentioned earlier about the similarities to Hawkins's theories I found in the book The i of the vortex by Rodolfo Llinás. Re-reading On Intelligence, I noticed that Jeff himself mentioned Llinás in the book, which is of course not surprising at all in hindsight. But it was funny to notice my enthusiasm compared to the fact that the reference to Llinás was there all along.