5 ms·
The long story of how neural nets got to where they are [video]
- ofslidingfeet 3y agoDavid Hume's Enquiry posits that our experience (and behavior) is heavily determined by networks of perceptrons, but he's never going to get credit for that.
- arketyp 3y agoI recall picking up something along those lines on my cursory reading of the Enquiry. Do you have a quote? Would be much appreciated.
- retrac 3y agoI'm not sure there's any short quote that summarizes it. But as I read him, thought is composed of ideas, which are themselves "no more than the compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing" of other ideas. And ideas are very simple things, fundamentally based on impresseions like awareness of the colour red or of pain. And these ideas relate to each other in terms of "only three Principles of Connexion among Ideas, viz. Resemblance, Contiguity in Time or Place, and Cause or Effect". I think equating his 'ideas' with perceptrons might be anachronistic. But it does seem to suggest complex and abstract ideas are composites, built of networks of networks of simpler ideas, the connections between them being of a simple nature as well, perhaps all boiling down to nothing more than many stacked layers of basic sensations being present or absent, plus how they are sequenced and associated. It's not completely revolutionary; much of it follows Aristotle. The particular emphasis on 'ideas' and their 'connexions' being everything to thought, is perhaps original to Hume. This is in essays 2 and 3. Makes me think of Leucippus and his atoms. Not really our atoms, and yet still uncanny in their resemblance, especially with so little to go on. Disclaimer: I haven't read it in some 20 years besides skimming for the above quotes, and I'm not a philosopher.
- arketyp 3y agoThat's precisely the content I had a dim memory of. Thanks for the summary. Good points and assessment.
- ofslidingfeet 3y agoI think the more someone considers the whole work, the clearer it becomes that Hume really did have a coherent model in mind, but the chapter "Of Probability" is a spot that might ring a bell for reasons that will be obvious: https://davidhume.org/texts/t/1/3/11 https://davidhume.org/texts/t/1/3/11 I think this section on animal intelligence helps spell it out too (I also have to wonder if people just ignore this part in general when they claim he's an "empiricist" in the understood sense, or maybe they just failed to fill in the missing shade of blue): https://davidhume.org/texts/e/9 https://davidhume.org/texts/e/9
- arketyp 3y agoMany thanks. He certainly carried thoughts beyond the tabula rasa.
- yantrams 3y agoThat would've been speculative with a dash of poetic license I presume ? Please correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think Hume proposed any mathematical model in this regard. Would love to see some references. Thanks
- ofslidingfeet 3y agoHis chapter on probability comes very close imo https://davidhume.org/texts/t/1/3/11 https://davidhume.org/texts/t/1/3/11
- yantrams 3y agoThank you :)
- typon 3y agoChomsky regards Hume as his personal intellectual hero - people really should read Hume more.
- quickthrower2 3y ago3 hours! Ill do it as 4*45 Looks interesting!
- kaycebasques 3y agoI listened at 1.5x. Maybe even 1.75x or 2x. That made the time commitment much more palatable for me.
- quickthrower2 3y agoI have got to the bit where he mentions the TV show where he demonstrates a talking NN with 20000 parameters. Would love to find that online (I tried).
- yantrams 3y agoThanks for the share! Does anyone have similar recommendations ( books | links | videos ) on the history of statistical inference ? Would love to know more about the evolution of statistical thought all the way from Pearson, Fischer etc. Cheers
- tsurba 3y agoThe Theory That Would Not Die, by McGrayne was fun, about the history of Bayesian statistics. Also not exactly what was asked, but so good: James Gleick’s ”Information”. It is about the history of information theory or how to statistically argue about information. Really starts from the beginning, eg. how some tribes used drums to talk to each other over kilometers away.
- yantrams 3y agoNice thank you this looks interesting! Cheers
- bigdict 3y agoThe Lady Tasting Tea was a great read on that exact topic.
- yantrams 3y agoWow incredible! This looks like just what I'm looking for! Thanks a ton!
- geen 3y ago[flagged]
- geen 3y ago[flagged]