A man who tried to redeem the world with logic (2015)
nautil.us
nautil.us
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.
It's not in the article, but Rosenblatt died in a freak boating accident before his views were revived in the 80s.
This truth is in the -motion suffix itself.
I love that you came to this conclusion based on logic (trial and error).
Because everybody likes tangentially related xkcd: https://xkcd.com/435/
Maybe this is an unfair generalization, but usually when i hear people say something like, the world runs on emotions, its used as an out to avoid having to understand where the other person is coming from, on the [BS] principle that emotions are irrational and unknowable.
Most people have poor self-awareness and don't understand themselves or their own needs.
I also don't believe rationality is subjective but an objective statement about the world. You might not know if someone else's actions are rational, but that has no bearing on how rational they actually are.
The "set of premises and goals" we currently operate upon are not ours, but planted by someone else (parents, teachers, media...).
Add to all this the fact that world may run however it wants, but the emotions are ours. If we alter the "set of premises and goals" we can alter our emotional response.
If you were to (theoretically) simulate the whole judgement process with all of its real world parameters, including whether or not the judge has eaten lunch yet, the computer would definitely conclude that the result will depend on whether the judge has eaten lunch yet.
However, whether or not it should depend on that is a judgement that the computer can't and won't make.
We can be emotional about pieces fitting together etc. but we certainly don't have to. Those pieces are still going to fit together.
As Threeve303 have said - "the world"/people run on emotion. Some of those people (a minority) are going to be attracted to logic because they will see the value of it. So, I guess, we can say that they will feel (have emotions?) toward logic, while others won't - but that doesn't matter because the "pieces are still fitting together" with or without people feeling anything toward logic.
(Hopefully that made sense, especially because English is not my first language.)
Kind regards,
dtl
Throw in some other logic, and you end up with the conclusion that the world can still be logical, but that many normative conclusions (which is what the world runs on) depend on moral axioms that differ from person to person.
So there's a distinction between people that reason correctly from their moral axioms, and people who don't. And among the ones who don't, there's a distinction between those that just make a mistake, and the ones that are deliberately presenting their arguments in bad faith. But even the latter have their own internal conclusions that are honest attempts at rational derivations from their internal values.
It's very common in philosophy (and the sciences, too) to find that the axioms lead to the wrong answer, and as a result say "oops, they must be wrong," and pick different axioms. In that case, though, the flow of epistimophlogiston is going from empiricism back to axioms, not from axioms to conclusions.
We as people both forward-chain and backward-chain. If I have principles that are important to me, I might reason forward from them to plan or conclude. And then if I discover an undesirable outcome, then that means I've learned something about myself, and then I can reason backwards to adjust what my principle actually is, and reason forward from that adjustment.
There's nothing morally wrong with learning and evolving. It doesn't by definition mean we're inconsistent.
>> It runs on emotion
So, I think, you are right.
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?
It's a fairly large collection of fields, from mathematical (systems dynamics, chaos theory) to philosophical (constructivism, second-order cybernetics which is a form of epistemology) to practical (systems thinking, automation, feedback mechanisms etc). It was by far the most influential school of thought in the 20th century. It was a revolution at the time but nonetheless died out before its time.
A good place to start would be W Ross Ashby's "An Introduction to Cybernetics", or Donella Meadows' "Thinking in Systems" for the systems theory side.
FWIW, Stephen Hawking claimed the 21st century would be defined by complexity theory. I'm disappointed to say that's not yet been the case.
As for the metaphysics comment - all of reality is emergent and arises from interactions at a lower level - newtonian physics emerge from quantum mechanics, chemistry emerges from newtonian physics, biology from chemistry, sociology from biology and so on (though things of course don't stack quite as neatly as that!) - so to understand how systems work in an abstract sense is very useful for understanding reality - it's like knowing physics, if knowing physics was still useful at the macro-level.
This also reminds me the story of Galois:
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
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.
Copied that from Pitts Wikipedia entry.
All our advancements are cumulative and everybody involved deserves to be feted and not forgotten.
Several? Seduced? Did the wife actually admitted to making the story up? Seems too elaborate to be wholly made up.
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.
As to the brain, evolution created it - we can replicate and improve it, eventually.
my wanderings brought me to an interesting thesis on building a non-aristotelean brain: https://www.vordenker.de/gunther_web/soul_of_a_robot.htm
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.