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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
both cybernetics and systems theory fit into a broader field called systems science (also called complexity theory), which is the study of complex systems. Essentially the field is adjacent to the scientific method, where the scientific method tests cause/effect from one variable to another, systems science aims to understand and model causal relations that can't be reduced to a single cause/effect consequence (and thus can't be accurately studied using reductionist methods).
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.
Fantastic, very interesting stuff. I'm aware of some of these topics but this gives me a good roadmap of how to approach the field more generally. Thank you!
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
You could argue being ethical is to simply be logically equitable. It's ethical to treat others with respect and report bad behavior, sure, but it's also logical to buy into the standards of society in order to enjoy those same basic protections yourself that ethics offers to other people. Treating others how you want to be treated is a mutually beneficial arrangement.
This argument taken ad infinitum though devolves into a pit of moral relativism. I happen to completely agree with your argument—ethics can be derived as a functional application of rational logic. But I think the more germane point being made was that establishing the normative sociocultural definition of collective Ethics, is ultimately an emotional determination (if guided by rational logic). There exists no metaphysical Ethics which can always be axiomatically derived on the basis of rational logical. At least I think that was the argument anyways…
Yeah the crux is, if you invent your own ethics then how do you make sure that they are universally applicable? How do you make sure people will agree with you instead of creating mutually incompatible ethics with the same intentions as you? You base them on logic with a sprinkle of emotion.
Well the answer is usually something along the lines of, dont be evil to your neighbour (or some variation thereof, whether that's put in terms of utility or universal laws), so i think it is related.
This is a common saying but i've never liked. The world running on emotions is just another way of saying the world runs on logic, just the premises and goals are different than what we think they should be.
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.
No. It is not another way of saying that. Saying that the world runs on emotions is saying that it runs according to rules that are seemingly inconsistent and opaque. And if you reply that it just runs on an underlying logic that we can’t see, then still for all intents and purposes its operation is illogical.
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.
I’m pretty sure even a computer would agree that whether a defendant is sentenced to prison or not shouldn’t depend on whether the judge has eaten lunch yet.
A computer won't tell you anything about what "should" or "shouldn't" happen.
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.
That’s a fairly baseless assertion to make. There’s nothing fundamentally special about the human mind that a computer couldn’t plausibly simulate eventually, and morality is included. A computer could just as easily develop morality as a human would. I would even argue it’s inevitable.
In many ways logic itself is emotional -- the feeling of pieces fitting together perfectly, the feeling of things that were unclear becoming clear; all these kind of feelings drive people toward logic as a way of thinking about the world.
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.)
You can square it with some basic philosophy. Hume's Guillotine - you can't derive an ought statement from is statements alone. Munchhausen Trilemma - you can only answer "why" with circular reasoning, infinite regress, or axioms - axioms being the only reasonable option of the three.
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.
People who claim to reason from moral axioms are usually hypocritical in special cases, or evil in special cases. If you observe the behavior of someone who believes in moral axioms, you will find that they will go back and change their axioms (at best) or ignore them, when they lead to a conclusion that goes against their natural moral intuitions. Otherwise (I have never seen someone do this, but I guess it's possible) they would be "evil in special cases," going against their conscience and probably doing something bad, just because they made a mistake in choosing their moral axioms long before the special case arose.
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.
On the other hand... that's exactly what it means to be human, and is not the flaw that it is often made out to be in the literature.
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.
I'm not certain that this is unfortunate. Being able to apply situational context and treat humans as complex beings rather than actors that must accept rational argument gives us a wider range of solutions to serious problems.
Given the high number of suicides and the high presence of mental health issues in tech (especially early university), this kind of stories touches me a lot. Even if there is no happy ending, knowing we're not alone is comforting in itself.
for some reason, I thought this article was going to be about count Alfred Korzybski and non-aristotelean logic. alas, it proved to be a sadder case of one of his contemporaries.
An autodidact in an hostile environment correcting Principia Mathematica at 12 and later pointed as "the genius" of a group who included von Neumann and Wiener. Pitts was clearly a mutant :)
73 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadShame 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.
http://web.mit.edu/STS.035/www/PDFs/edvac.pdf
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.
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.
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.
Copied that from Pitts Wikipedia entry.
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.
Several? Seduced? Did the wife actually admitted to making the story up? Seems too elaborate to be wholly made up.
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?
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.
This also reminds me the story of Galois:
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
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
All our advancements are cumulative and everybody involved deserves to be feted and not forgotten.