Page 39 - Deep Learning

22 Introduction

human learning must complement inductive mechanisms with a second set of
non-monotonic learning mechanisms that allow experience to be overruled.
The hypothesis that we possess cognitive mechanisms for overriding the
imperatives of the past does not imply that doing so is effortless. Everyday life
requires a balance between projecting and overriding past experience – what
philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn has called “the essential tension” – and there is
no reason to believe that evolution provided us with a perfect solution to this
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balancing problem. to explain cognitive change is to explain both the possi-
bility and difficulty of non-monotonic change.
Situations in which the environment is the source of change and the per-
son has to follow suit are interesting cases of non-monotonic change, but peo-
ple are also agents of change. The astonishing developments in art, business,
science and technology since the dawn of civilization some 12,000 years ago
measure our capacity to instigate change and create novelty. People sometimes
create something novel in order to fill a need, sometimes because they have a
vision of how things ought to be and sometimes for no other reason than that
they desire change. changes instigated by one person or group of persons fre-
quently create a need in others to adapt to those changes.
Adaptation to the changes imposed by the environment – typically
referred to as learning – and the deliberate initiation of change – often
referred to as creativity – might seem like distinct cases and are usually
treated as such, but closer examination reveals a deep similarity. When
people instigate change by acting differently, something must have changed
in their minds. the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso changed the art of paint-
ing when he initiated the cubist movement by painting Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon. to produce that painting, Picasso must have created a new
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concept about what a painting should be, or could be, or should or could
accomplish. We need not believe that he worked out the complete compo-
sition before setting brush to canvas, nor need we assume that the ambition
to paint in a new way was fully conscious at the start. However, some-
thing must have changed in Picasso’s mind or else the work could not have
turned out so different from anything painted before.
The deep Learning Hypothesis suggests that the processes that produce the
cognitive changes required to track environmental change will turn out to be the
same processes that produce the cognitive changes that enable us to create novelty.
The working assumption that these two cases will eventually fall under the same
theory unites two fields of research – creativity and learning – which have been
kept separate by accidents of historical origin and differences in conceptual foun-
dations, methods and vocabulary, to the detriment of both.