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I agree. I’m currently taking a neural networks course and it’s making my discomfort worse, not alleviating it. At the beginning of the course we talked about
by chongli 4y ago
I agree. I’m currently taking a neural networks course and it’s making my discomfort worse, not alleviating it.
At the beginning of the course we talked about biological models of neurons and that was pretty cool, if a bit simplistic. Now we’re deep into automatic differentiation and gradient descent and a bunch of hidden layers. Ultimately it’s all just using calculus to approximate some unknown function given a sample of data. The connection to biology, to real living brains, seems like a distant memory.
There is no path to understanding, from what I can see. It’s pure instrumentalism and parlour tricks.
- LeanderK 4y agoneural networks are vaguely inspired by the human brain but have as much in common with the humans brain as planes have with birds
- krona 4y agoComplex systems theory is probably a better area to at least get to grips with if you want to gain at least an idea of what the shape of our lack of our understanding is like, vis-a-vis cognition etc. Automatic differentiation is too deep in the weeds whereas the 'behaviour' of neural networks is more emergent.
- ghosty141 4y ago> There is no path to understanding, from what I can see. It’s pure instrumentalism and parlour tricks. Exactly like nature. It feels like emulating whats happening in nature for a very specific usecase under some constraints.