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A man who tried to redeem the world with logic (2015)
- civildude 6y agoWell, that was depressing.
- billfruit 6y agoIt 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 6y ago[deleted]
- not2b 6y agoWriters 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.
- nahuel0x 6y agoFollowing this article, is very interesting to read the "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" by Von Neumann (1945): http://web.mit.edu/STS.035/www/PDFs/edvac.pdf http://web.mit.edu/STS.035/www/PDFs/edvac.pdf
- dang 6y agoIf curious, past threads: Walter Pitts pioneered neural networks. Then he lit his entire PhD on fire - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15987076 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003735 - Feb 2015 (23 comments) Others?
- cyberlab 6y agoHow 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 https://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/capsules/outil_bleu25.html
- UncleOxidant 6y agoIt'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.
- thevardanian 6y agoGeorge 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.
- jhickok 6y agoThe spiritual successor to Pitts-- Frank Rosenblatt-- has a similarly dramatic end. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/09/professors-perceptron-paved-way-ai-60-years-too-soon 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 6y agoIt'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 6y agoAnd 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.
- asdff 6y agoAnd 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.
- beaconstudios 6y agoslight 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 6y agoThank you. If you have any additional resources on the topic I'd love to read more.
- beaconstudios 6y agoboth 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.
- bezout 6y agoI 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.
- chr1 6y agoWhat 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.
- jdhendrickson 6y agoSo if not scientists methodically studying a field, who would you turn to for answers? I'm struggling to understand the point of your statement.
- bezout 6y agoJust don’t assume that your field is the only one key to the holy grail. Be open to the other scientific fields
- eevilspock 6y agohttps://xkcd.com/55/ https://xkcd.com/55/
- antattack 6y agoFor one, scientists make observations, form hypothesis, test predictions and repeat. As to the brain, evolution created it - we can replicate and improve it, eventually.
- anonymous_i 6y ago> 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.
- throwaway81523 6y ago2015.
- Coastall 6y agoJust 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.
- antattack 6y ago"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 6y agoIt'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 6y agoWas she ever prosecuted for that?
- dinero_rojo 6y agoIt’s not really a crime to lie to your husband.
- catgary 6y agoSlander is a crime.
- beaconstudios 6y agoit's a civil offense, not a crime - you can sue for slander but you can't go to prison for it.
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- Threeve303 6y agoUnfortunately after much trial and error I have discovered that the “world” doesn’t run on logic. It runs on emotion.
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- EricMausler 6y agoThis is far from unfortunate. Ethics comes from emotion
- asdff 6y agoYou 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.
- 0xf8 6y agoThis 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…
- imtringued 6y agoYeah 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.
- sammalloy 6y agoOne wonders how many years of progress were lost due to the lies of Margaret Wiener.
- brutusborn 6y agoI think the most unfortunate part is that it could be avoided if her husband had just applied the principle of innocence until guilt is proven.
- TeeMassive 6y agoGiven 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. This also reminds me the story of Galois: https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1129&context=honors https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
- throwbigdata 6y agoWhat a wonderful beautiful story.
- jerrysievert 6y agofor 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. 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 https://www.vordenker.de/gunther_web/soul_of_a_robot.htm
- rramadass 6y agoA very good article which lays forth the pathos of a tortured genius. All our advancements are cumulative and everybody involved deserves to be feted and not forgotten.
- nahuel0x 6y agoAn 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 :)