"The work was important, but for Pitts it was unsettling because it punctured his view of the brain as a hierarchy of logical propositions."
That's interesting to me, because the visual system (in the standard account anyway) is at least a bit like a hierarchy of propositions; contrast detectors build up into edge detectors, edge detectors build up into shape detectors, and so on. That paper even identifies fly detectors, which more or less signal the proposition "there is a fly in this part of the visual field".
I wonder what kind of results Pitts had in mind, if this was insufficiently propositional?
It’s interesting. I don’t know specifically but reading between the lines I suspect it’s the ‘logical’ part that posed the problem. Pitts was something of a nativist, and the feature detector work was - eventually - used by connectionist researchers to make the case for learning approaches. Possibly something similar was going on, but hard to say for sure!
I know the "paradigm shift" idea of science is overstated... but sometimes I learn about a bitterly rancorous scientific dispute from decades ago and think, wow this really is completely incomprehensible. There's an interesting book to be written about utterly baffling reasons scientists have had for being mad at each other.
Though perhaps this case is better explained by personal rather than scientific troubles.
"The work was important, but for Pitts it was unsettling because it punctured his view of the brain as a hierarchy of logical propositions."
That's interesting to me, because the visual system (in the standard account anyway) is at least a bit like a hierarchy of propositions; contrast detectors build up into edge detectors, edge detectors build up into shape detectors, and so on. That paper even identifies fly detectors, which more or less signal the proposition "there is a fly in this part of the visual field".
I wonder what kind of results Pitts had in mind, if this was insufficiently propositional?
It’s interesting. I don’t know specifically but reading between the lines I suspect it’s the ‘logical’ part that posed the problem. Pitts was something of a nativist, and the feature detector work was - eventually - used by connectionist researchers to make the case for learning approaches. Possibly something similar was going on, but hard to say for sure!
I know the "paradigm shift" idea of science is overstated... but sometimes I learn about a bitterly rancorous scientific dispute from decades ago and think, wow this really is completely incomprehensible. There's an interesting book to be written about utterly baffling reasons scientists have had for being mad at each other.
Though perhaps this case is better explained by personal rather than scientific troubles.