Epstein Secrets

the 1930s- 1940s: Godel's Incompleteness Theorems (1931); Turing's "On Computable Numbers, With An Application To The Entscheidungsproblem" (1936); Bateson's theory of "Schismogenesis" in Naven (1936); Rosenblueth, Weiner & Bigelow's "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" (1943); McCullouch & Pitts's "A Logi

ver the sessions and decided who to invite and what they should talk about. von Foerster, as Secretary, was the driving force of the project. It was McCulloch who insisted over Norbert Wiener's objections that "mind" be introduced into the mix, and for this, he recruited Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead.

llough wanted to include mind. He turned to cultural anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead to make the connection to the social sciences. Bateson in particular was increasingly talking about patterns and processes, or “the pattern that connects.” He called for a new kind of systems ecology in w

t its consequences are intimately bound up in the idea of an impending technological singularity. His work on neuroscience and his initial support of McCulloch and Pitts adumbrated the startlingly effective deep-learning methods of the present day. Over the past decade, and particularly in the last five year

ly in the body but also in pathways outside the body, and there is a larger Mind, of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger Mind, Bateson holds, is comparable to God, and is perhaps what some people mean by “God,” but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and pl

It’s fun to show it an abstract painting and see what it says. But it does a pretty good job. It works using the same neural-network technology that McCulloch and Pitts imagined in 1943 and lots of us worked on in the early eighties. Back in the 1980s, people successfully did OCR—optical character recogniti

llough wanted to include mind. He turned to cultural anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead to make the connection to the social sciences. Bateson in particular was increasingly talking about patterns and processes, or “the pattern that connects.” He called for a new kind of systems ecology in w

t its consequences are intimately bound up in the idea of an impending technological singularity. His work on neuroscience and his initial support of McCulloch and Pitts adumbrated the startlingly effective deep-learning methods of the present day. Over the past decade, and particularly in the last five year

ly in the body but also in pathways outside the body, and there is a larger Mind, of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger Mind, Bateson holds, is comparable to God, and is perhaps what some people mean by “God,” but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and pl

It’s fun to show it an abstract painting and see what it says. But it does a pretty good job. It works using the same neural-network technology that McCulloch and Pitts imagined in 1943 and lots of us worked on in the early eighties. Back in the 1980s, people successfully did OCR—optical character recogniti