Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!quintus.UUCP!ok From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: Re: backward path and religions Message-ID: <19880830031800.3.NICK@HOWARD-JOHNSONS.LCS.MIT.EDU> Date: 30 Aug 88 03:18:00 GMT Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 63 Approved: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu Path: quintus!ok From: Richard A. O'Keefe Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: Re: backward path and religions Date: Fri, 26 Aug 88 06:20 EDT References: <19880826025229.6.NICK@HOWARD-JOHNSONS.LCS.MIT.EDU> Sender: quintus!news@Sun.COM Reply-To: Richard A. O'Keefe Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc. Lines: 51 In article <19880826025229.6.NICK@HOWARD-JOHNSONS.LCS.MIT.EDU> LEO@BGERUG51.BITNET writes: >Secondly, consider a self-learning, self-organizing neural netwerk. >Furthermore, suppose this system is searching for answers to questions in a >field from which it has almost no knowledge. In this case, the system might >ask for things that it can never find. But, because of the self-learning, >self-organizing character, it will build answers, imaginary ones, if it >keeps asking long enough. To my opinion, this is the essence of religions >and superstitions. I presume that the number of layers or the 'distance' >between the sense perception and the abstract thinking level is too big. I'm canny enough not to ask what a "self-learning" system is ... "Building imaginary answers" sounds like hypothesis formation in general. This is the essence of science! Or rather, science = making up stories + trying to knock down other people's stories. Does anyone seriously suppose that the number of layers between sense perceptions and SuperString theory is small? A range of diseases was attributed to "filterable viruses" -- "virus" just being a word meaning "poison, venom" -- on what really amounted to a stubborn faith that the germ theory of disease could be extended beyond the range of sense data years before viruses were "observed". Popular beliefs about the origins of life are based on a very long series of inferences (and what is more, as Cairns-Smith points out, are quite incompatible with the known behaviour of the chemicals in question). There is a serious illusion in talking about modern science: we read instruments at least as much through theories as through our eyes, and mistake remote inferences "5 volts across these terminals" for sense data. To be iconoclastic, I'd like to suggest that the main difference between societies in which science dominates and ones in which superstition dominates is that the former have a sufficient surplus that they can AFFORD to check their hypotheses. In society X, there are such large surpluses that the society can afford to force thousands of farmers out of business in the interests of fighting inflation. Society X can afford a lot of agricultural experiments. In society Y, there are no surpluses, so farmer Z continues to put offerings in the spirit-house, because if he tested his belief (by not making offerings) and he was wrong, it would mean disaster. Society Y is not going to do much science. To put it bluntly, if the risk from examining a practice is greater than the risk from continuing it, it is _RATIONAL_ not to examine it. This is the kind of thing that ethological and anthropological studies should be able to illuminate: when will an animal explore new territory as opposed to staying in its home range (how does the animal's "knowledge" of the availability of food in the home range affect this), is there a detectable relationship between the "rigidity" of a society and its surpluses? I don't think that neural nets as such have anything to do with the case.