
Walter Pitts pioneered neural networks. Then he lit his entire PhD on fire - bolmn
http://nautil.us/issue/21/information/the-man-who-tried-to-redeem-the-world-with-logic
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igravious
(early 2015)

previous discussion, 3 years ago, 23 comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003735](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003735)

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dang
And again a year ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13190601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13190601)

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westoncb
Really makes me wonder how such a brilliant person spends their time once
they're not preoccupied with work. The article wasn't too clear on the precise
timeline, but it sounded like there was over a decade where we're told he was
just drinking—I'd be very curious to know more about the specifics of how he
spent his time during that period. It may be that for the purposes of an
article like this 'nothing of importance' took place, but I'd bet there are
interesting aspects to it.

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ynonym00s
"There was a catch, though: This symbolic abstraction made the world
transparent but the brain opaque. Once everything had been reduced to
information governed by logic, the actual mechanics ceased to matter—the
tradeoff for universal computation was ontology. ... anything and everything …
can be done by an appropriate mechanism, and specifically by a neural
mechanism—and that even one, definite mechanism can be ‘universal.’ Inverting
the argument: Nothing that we may know or learn about the functioning of the
organism can give, without ‘microscopic,’ cytological work any clues regarding
the further details of the neural mechanism.”

\- Would anyone mind to ELI5 this for me?

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Twisol
If something can do anything, than the way in which it can do _any_ thing
doesn't much tell you how it does one _particular_ thing. In contrast, a
mechanical clock can be inspected, and the way in which it tells time can be
understood by its construction.

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ynonym00s
So, w.r.t to Pitt's research, proving that the brain could compute anything
(like a Turing machine) does not help in understanding how it does one
particular thing, for e.g. language?

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Twisol
Kind of. It's not the idea that the brain is a Turing machine that's the
problem -- I think it's fairly well established that given enough scratch
paper, a human _could_ manually execute an algorithm for any computable
function. The problem is more specifically that in Pitt's model, all of the
behavioral work is offloaded to the abstract logic, leaving none for the
physical wetware. Of course, today we know that the brain does have quite a
bit of physical structure, and we have learned a lot about how the brain
functions by looking at these structures.

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Apocryphon
One can only speculate what he would have accomplished, had he lived a full
life.

