Time & Perspective Quote by Jeff Hawkins

Progress doesn’t stall because we lack data; it stalls because we smuggle in a story that feels “obvious” and then build entire theories on top of it. Jeff Hawkins, speaking as an inventor rather than a philosopher, is pointing at the real villain in scientific and technological dead-ends: the intuitive assumption that frames the problem before anyone starts “solving” it. Intuition is efficient for navigating daily life, but it’s a terrible judge of what’s true at cosmic scales, microscopic scales, or inside complex systems like brains and markets. It prefers tidy, human-sized explanations.

The line works because it subtly shifts blame from ignorance to confidence. “Big obstacles” aren’t presented as mere gaps in knowledge; they’re portrayed as active barricades constructed from wrong premises. That’s a sharper critique than it sounds. Hawkins is warning that the most dangerous errors aren’t mistakes you can correct with another experiment, but the unexamined defaults you don’t realize you’re defending: time as absolute, species as fixed, the brain as a simple input-output machine, intelligence as a bag of tricks rather than a structured model of the world.

There’s also an inventor’s practicality embedded here. Invention is applied epistemology: every breakthrough product or model begins by rejecting a “common sense” constraint as optional. Hawkins’ subtext is a challenge to his own field, AI and neuroscience, where intuitive metaphors (the brain as computer, intelligence as bigger statistics) can become dogma. He’s arguing for a kind of humility that’s aggressive: assume your starting point is guilty until proven otherwise.