Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Thinking Machines 131pies. Every substantially different kind of example must be in the trainingset^OLthe network will interpolate spuriously, as in the story of thestatisticians on a duck hunt: One shoots a yard too high, the secondshoots a yard t"p lnw anrl fb,e third shouts, "We got him!" ,Why put connectoplasm under such strong lights? Certainly notbecause I think neural-network modeling is unimportant—quite the contrary!Without it, my whole edifice on how the mind works would be leftlevitating in midair. Nor do I think that network modeling is merely subcontractingout the work of building demons and data structures fromneural hardware. Many connectionist models offer real surprises aboutwhat the simplest steps of mental computation can accomplish. I dothink that connectionism has been oversold. Because networks are advertisedas soft, parallel, analogical, biological, and continuous, they haveacquired a cuddly connotation and a diverse fan club. But neural networksdon't perform miracles, only some logical and statistical operations.The choices of an input representation, of the number of networks, of thewiring diagram chosen for each one, and of the data pathways and controlstructures that interconnect them explain more about what makes a systemsmart than do the generic powers of the component connectoplasm.But my main intent is not to show what certain kinds of models cannotdo but what the mind can do. The point of this chapter is to give youa feel for the stuff our minds are made of. Thoughts and thinking are nolonger ghostly enigmas but mechanical processes that can be studied, andthe strengths and weaknesses of different theories can be examined anddebated. I find it particularly illuminating to see the shortcomings of thevenerable doctrine of the association of ideas, because they highlightthe precision, subtlety, complexity, and open-endedness of our everydaythinking. The computational power of human thought has real consequences.It is put to good use in our capacity for love, justice, creativity,literature, music, kinship, law, science, and other activities we willexplore in later chapters. But before we get to them, we must return tothe other question that opened this chapter.ALADDIN'S LAMPWhat about consciousness? What makes us actually suffer the pain of atoothache or see the blue of the sky as blue? The computational theory of