>>45
He has been fairly ignorant with the way he blows off these other functions. Of course there's room for cutting corners, especially when the equivalent of biological maintenance can be abstracted to independent systems, but he's thrown out a few babies with this bathwater. Any intelligent system is an informed system, and he's written off the regions that inform the system as unimportant, even though he intends to (out of recognized necessity) replace those unimportant functions with his own. They're not
all caught up in biological maintenance, and some of them function in very impressive ways which we understand fairly well. To ignore them because they were developed before the neocortex is just plain ignorance.
PS. I'm being vague about specifics because I want you to think for yourself. To do that you'll need more information than Hawkins will (or can) give you. The same goes for the information I give you: come to your own conclusions, just make sure it's not "whatever Jeff Hawkins says is right." When it comes to the brain nobody's right about everything. It's hard if you're not a neuroscientist, but you'll have to source your own information too... and wikipedia isn't enough.