Re: seeking article

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Sep 11 2003 - 15:22:29 MDT

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    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/
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