[HN Gopher] A man who tried to redeem the world with logic (2015)
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A man who tried to redeem the world with logic (2015)
Author : JPLeRouzic
Score : 88 points
Date : 2021-03-30 16:59 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| Threeve303 wrote:
| Unfortunately after much trial and error I have discovered that
| the "world" doesn't run on logic. It runs on emotion.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| billfruit wrote:
| It is amazing to know that Mcullou-Pitt neuron models did have
| influence on the very first computers. The strain of thought of
| trying to make an artificial brain was mixed into the realization
| of the first computers.
|
| Shame though this type of click bait article titles are finding
| favour with writers and reporters. The name could have been
| mentioned in the title without making it sound like a mystery.
| [deleted]
| not2b wrote:
| Writers and reporters don't get to choose the article titles.
| They are chosen to maximize page views. Many sites even do A/B
| testing: there are two or more different possible article
| titles, at first the title is chosen at random, then the one
| that gets more clicks is kept.
| Coastall wrote:
| Just came across this story. It was written several years ago,
| but remains pretty poignant. The article is long and
| biographical, difficult to summarize, but worth reading for a
| glimpse at some of the early brilliant AI researchers. If you
| don't have time or inclination for the full article, I recommend
| this segment at the beginning, in which he corrected Bertrand
| Russell as a 12-year-old:
|
| _he wandered through the stacks of books until he came across
| Principia Mathematica, a three-volume tome written by Bertrand
| Russell and Alfred Whitehead between 1910 and 1913, which
| attempted to reduce all of mathematics to pure logic. Pitts sat
| down and began to read. For three days he remained in the library
| until he had read each volume cover to cover--nearly 2,000 pages
| in all--and had identified several mistakes. Deciding that
| Bertrand Russell himself needed to know about these, the boy
| drafted a letter to Russell detailing the errors. Not only did
| Russell write back, he was so impressed that he invited Pitts to
| study with him as a graduate student at Cambridge University in
| England. Pitts couldn't oblige him, though--he was only 12 years
| old. But three years later, when he heard that Russell would be
| visiting the University of Chicago, the 15-year-old ran away from
| home and headed for Illinois. He never saw his family again._
| anonymous_i wrote:
| > leading Pitts to burn his unpublished doctoral dissertation on
| probabilistic three-dimensional neural networks and years of
| unpublished research.
|
| Copied that from Pitts Wikipedia entry.
| civildude wrote:
| Well, that was depressing.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| 2015.
| antattack wrote:
| "She sat Wiener down and informed him that when their daughter,
| Barbara, had stayed at McCulloch's house in Chicago, several of
| "his boys" had seduced her."
|
| Several? Seduced? Did the wife actually admitted to making the
| story up? Seems too elaborate to be wholly made up.
| gwern wrote:
| It's such an inflammatory claim, and such a psychopathic thing
| to do, that back in 2015 I had a hard time believing it but I
| looked up the references after reading OP and it seemed to
| check out.
| Animats wrote:
| Was she ever prosecuted for that?
| dinero_rojo wrote:
| It's not really a crime to lie to your husband.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| slight tangent to the article, but cybernetics applies much more
| broadly than just the brain and the machine, and causal loops are
| the fundamental mechanism behind emergence in general.
| Cybernetics isn't just a mathematical field, it's a metaphysic,
| especially when combined with systems theory for understanding
| how said emergence plays out on a higher level.
| airstrike wrote:
| Thank you. If you have any additional resources on the topic
| I'd love to read more.
| cyberlab wrote:
| How do you 'redeem the world' based on highly specific and biased
| theories about the mind-vs-computers? There are so many counter-
| narratives to the brain-as-computer narrative. Read further on
| this here:
| https://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/capsules/outil_bleu25.html
| jhickok wrote:
| If you think this article has something to say about Pitts'
| views, I do not think you read the article carefully.
| ewmiller wrote:
| The headline is pretty misleading and emotionally worded. The
| actual article doesn't really talk about "redemption" of the
| world.
| dang wrote:
| If curious, past threads:
|
| _Walter Pitts pioneered neural networks. Then he lit his entire
| PhD on fire_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15987076 -
| Dec 2017 (8 comments)
|
| _A Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13190601 - Dec 2016 (16
| comments)
|
| _The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003735 - Feb 2015 (23
| comments)
|
| Others?
| [deleted]
| bezout wrote:
| I find it a bit naive that scientists assume that their field can
| explain everything there is to know about a certain topic. We
| should weight every assumption very carefully - especially when
| dealing with complex biological entities such as the brain.
| antattack wrote:
| For one, scientists make observations, form hypothesis, test
| predictions and repeat.
|
| As to the brain, evolution created it - we can replicate and
| improve it, eventually.
| jdhendrickson wrote:
| So if not scientists methodically studying a field, who would
| you turn to for answers? I'm struggling to understand the point
| of your statement.
| eevilspock wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/55/
| bezout wrote:
| Just don't assume that your field is the only one key to the
| holy grail. Be open to the other scientific fields
| chr1 wrote:
| What are the alternatives to explaining everything about the
| brain?
|
| As far as i can tell the possibilities are that it is
| equivalent to a
|
| 1. computation that can be performed on reasonably sized Turing
| Machine
|
| 2. computation that requires too large Turing machine, (in
| which case we still most likely can build an alternative
| implementation of a brain using some other physical phenomena)
|
| 3. the function that appears to be performed by brain is not
| performed by brain, so we do not have a way to recreate that
| function by studying the brain.
|
| Whichever of these you assume to be true, the job of the
| scientist remains the same: poke at the problem until you build
| a good model of the brain and see if it works or not. And since
| there is no difference, and there is a huge amount of indirect
| evidence for the first hypothesis there's nothing wrong with
| using it as the main working hypothesis.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| It's interesting to see that neural nets were there from the
| beginning of the computing age. McColloch, Pitts and von Neumann
| were thinking of a connectionist approach from the start.
|
| Such a sad end for Pitts. I couldn't help thinking that he was
| kind of like Will in Good Will Hunting - a complete outsider, a
| self-taught genius with a very rough upbringing and lots of
| demons from that past.
| asdff wrote:
| And neural nets are just graphical models which has been around
| since the early 1900s. I have a theory that everything new in
| data analysis today has already been invented 50-100 years ago
| by statisticians.
| jhickok wrote:
| The spiritual successor to Pitts-- Frank Rosenblatt-- has a
| similarly dramatic end.
| https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/09/professors-perceptr...
|
| It's not in the article, but Rosenblatt died in a freak boating
| accident before his views were revived in the 80s.
| WORLD_ENDS_SOON wrote:
| It's very sad Rosenblatt did not live to see the resurgence
| of neural networks and his perceptron algorithm. The
| perceptron algorithm isn't exactly what we use to train
| neural networks today, but it's similar enough in theory and
| practice that it still feels very fundamental to
| understanding machine learning.
| jhickok wrote:
| And at least in the CogSci space, Rosenblatt's work was
| instrumental for the PDP (Parallel Distributed Processing)
| working group in the mid eighties that led to
| backpropogation methods.
| thevardanian wrote:
| George Boole believed in a similar idea far before any idea of
| computers were known. In a sense then the entire endeavor of
| computation has to do with consciousness from beginning to end.
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