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World views share the neural network's fuzziness. They are not
precise, but they're frequently close enough. They can be wildly
inaccurate. But it isn't accuracy that counts, it's utility. They may be
sloppy, but they render solutions to real world problems fast. As
neural net builder John Hopfield says, "Biology, by and large, is not
interested in finding the best things, just things that are pretty good
that can be found quickly."
The creators of electronic spiderwebs have called them neural
nets for a reason. These problem-solving skeins of wiring are
deliberately modeled on the networks of nerve cells in the brain. In
fact, the brain contains webs of circuitry so vast that the machines
being built in scientific laboratories are pathetically minuscule by
comparison.
The world view you build from childhood is carried in billions of
cells whose connecting threads are precisely adjusted to give you your
picture of the world. The late Dr. Donald Hebb, "one of the foremost
theoreticians on the subject of the human brain,"3 called those networks
"cell assemblies." He described these as circuits through which stimuli
flow like waters through the delta of the Mississippi. If that's true, it
would help explain a bit about the nature of understanding. Hebb's
model of interconnected mental circuits helps us comprehend why,
though we're hit with thousands of random perceptions, very few stick
to us. Occasionally one jumps out as significant because it seems to fit
within our pattern of beliefs. It can be patched in to our existing neural
net.
If we believe that life is a battle between Satan and God, some
small event can seem proof positive that Satan is out to snare us. If we
believe, as the Chinese and the Romans did, that the heavens are filled
with messages about our fate, the sight of a shooting star may send us
panicking with a sense of imminent calamity. If our belief system says
absolutely nothing about a relationship between the stars and life on
earth, that same blazing meteorite will seem like a passing curiosity of
no lasting significance. In the case of the person who believes that the
heavens portend events on earth, the sight of the shooting star is
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