My "Thousand Brains" book review

[BrainConstellation]

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@markNZed

I will try to surprise you The presentation of the columns as voting is perhaps misleading because it leads to images of invariant representations that are shared and “agreed on.” I think the problem Jeff addresses is how the system could functon without needing those representations being passed around.

I would like to focus on this point first. I am really interested in understanding your understanding of the voting process in the TBT. For me it seem quite apparent, that there seems to be some uncertainty as to how this voting process exactly takes place. IMO the best description is that provided by Eric Collins (CollinsEM) in the parallel thread you refered to earlier:

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@CollinsEM

You could think of it more like rank choice voting. Each column has a list of candidates that it sees as viable options that correspond to the input signal. It then sends it’s best guess to the other columns, but if that candidate is not well supported by evidence from other columns then it is thrown out and the next most viable candidate selected. This continues until consensus is reached, or the column gives up and bursts because all of its viable candidates have been rejected.

This is exactly my understanding of how the consensus building takes place. You are still very right that there is no centralized vote counting. But rank choice voting still leads to the result that in the end, for the entire “superset” of cortical columns that are involved in the voting, the most common selected choice emerges as the stable “winner”. It is almost like finding the highest common denominator of a group of number (to use a mathematical metaphor). This is still a disambiguation process taking place at the collective level of the cortical columns. The collective has not decided which model is the best fit to the perceived reality (input) until this consensus is reached. So final disambiguation cannot be attained by any singular cortical column. It requires the collective of the cortical columns to reach that consensus. This is the true, decisive final disambiguation of the perception taking place.

Perhaps the problem understanding this, is that the representation of the final perception is not stored in any of the cortical columns. The knowledge representation of the perception taking place is only stored outside the cortical columns in the active distal axon connections for the group (collective) of participating cortical columns. We are used to looking inside the CCs in their SDRs for the representations that we associate with consciousness. But in TBT the representation that corresponds to consciousness is in the network of distant axon connections of the CCs. Only the set of distant connections that wins remains active. And that set has the common denominator in each CC active.