From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Sep 11 2003 - 15:22:29 MDT
On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 11:57:13AM -0400, Michael Wiik wrote:
>
> I know little about neural nets, but understand that they can become
> deadlocked too in a sense, and need some sort of reset, and wondering if
> our civilization is the same way.
Huh? Neural networks can become overtrained if they are too large and
get too little data - they learn each individual piece of data but does
not generalize them to intermediary values. Attractor neural networks
can also suffer from catastrophic forgetting: they can store a finite
amount of information, but if they are trained with more they forget
everything and become useless, unable to either learn or retrieve. The
"solution" is to make them forgetful, so that they forget old or
irrelevant information, or make them extend themselves with new neurons
as needed.
Looking at your post, your thrust seem to be that our civilization is
getting too rigid, locked into non-adaptable patterns. A bit like
catastrophic forgetting: we have filled our potential of complexity, and
adding anything more will break the patterns. I think this is an overly
pessimistic view. I rather think the situation is like selforganised
criticality. Whenever things get too rigid and blocked, they build up
pressure and eventually break. The result is a state of dynamic
equilibrium where large and small changes occurs. Sometimes this results
in dramatic and painful cascades, sometimes in minor disturbances. The
small disturbances are far more common than the big ones and serve to
prevent them (typical examples are brushfires, which prevent larger
forest fires). Maybe the real threat would be if a global civilization
manages to hold off such changes too long - the pressure builds up, and
when the shift comes it hurts a lot of people. That's why I'm happy
there are still mongolian horsemen on the Asian steppes - they are a
valuable backup.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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