13.3 Why do Physical Laws Exist? (Koji Hashimoto)
197
13.2 Why Does Intelligence Exist? (Akinori Tanaka)
Rachel Carson, who is one of the most famous biologists and wrote a book Silent
Spring which describes the harmful effects of chemicals on ecosystems, has a short
essay in her other book, The Sense of Wonder. In that essay, the sense of wonder
is “the mind that feels the nature as it is and as being wonderful.” When learning
/ studying physics and mathematics, people often get asked “why such a useless
subject?” or are labeled as “freakish.” There were such times for me, and I was
frustrated when I couldn’t verbalize why I got attracted to these fields. But a possible
answer may be, to feel the sense of wonder.
Why do we have such a “sense of wonder” in the first place? If the brain’s
actions could all be explained by chemical reactions, there is no possibility that
“consciousness” would appear there. Everything would simply be a physical
phenomenon caused by chemical reactions. In that sense, consciousness may be
an illusion. Even if consciousness is an illusion, at least humans have “intelligence,”
and there is no doubt that they have ability of logical information processing.
Because there are intelligent creatures in this world, I feel that there may be
some relationship between the existence of intelligence and the laws of physics.
I’m interested in the great (and naive) mystery of why the universe started, why
it’s expanding, why it’s four-dimensional, etc., but just as much, I think that
the following is also an interesting question: why does intelligence exist? Once
you know the answer, you may even be able to create intelligence. Although the
development in deep learning in recent years has shown its potential, as is often said,
there is currently no theoretical explanation why deep learning works. Revealing
that, you may be able to approach the mystery of intelligence.
13.3 Why do Physical Laws Exist? (Koji Hashimoto)
“Philosophy is useless when doing physics.” When I was a freshman in graduate
school, I walked down the hall with Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of the Scientific
Revolution, and I still remember that my supervisor told me those words. Is it really
useless?
“The general coordinate transformation invariance, which is the principle of
general relativity, is natural, because it is a way for humans to recognize the outside
world.” When I was a freshman at university, I was told this by a particle theorist,
Sho Tanaka. Is it true?
As discussed in Chap. 7 of this book, the revolutionary discovery of concepts in
physics is an inverse problem. What performs learning (which is an inverse problem)
is neural networks, which are the means by which humans recognize, think, and
remember the outside world. And, as we have seen repeatedly in this book, artificial
neural networks use the concept of physics when implemented as deep learning and
197
13.2 Why Does Intelligence Exist? (Akinori Tanaka)
Rachel Carson, who is one of the most famous biologists and wrote a book Silent
Spring which describes the harmful effects of chemicals on ecosystems, has a short
essay in her other book, The Sense of Wonder. In that essay, the sense of wonder
is “the mind that feels the nature as it is and as being wonderful.” When learning
/ studying physics and mathematics, people often get asked “why such a useless
subject?” or are labeled as “freakish.” There were such times for me, and I was
frustrated when I couldn’t verbalize why I got attracted to these fields. But a possible
answer may be, to feel the sense of wonder.
Why do we have such a “sense of wonder” in the first place? If the brain’s
actions could all be explained by chemical reactions, there is no possibility that
“consciousness” would appear there. Everything would simply be a physical
phenomenon caused by chemical reactions. In that sense, consciousness may be
an illusion. Even if consciousness is an illusion, at least humans have “intelligence,”
and there is no doubt that they have ability of logical information processing.
Because there are intelligent creatures in this world, I feel that there may be
some relationship between the existence of intelligence and the laws of physics.
I’m interested in the great (and naive) mystery of why the universe started, why
it’s expanding, why it’s four-dimensional, etc., but just as much, I think that
the following is also an interesting question: why does intelligence exist? Once
you know the answer, you may even be able to create intelligence. Although the
development in deep learning in recent years has shown its potential, as is often said,
there is currently no theoretical explanation why deep learning works. Revealing
that, you may be able to approach the mystery of intelligence.
13.3 Why do Physical Laws Exist? (Koji Hashimoto)
“Philosophy is useless when doing physics.” When I was a freshman in graduate
school, I walked down the hall with Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of the Scientific
Revolution, and I still remember that my supervisor told me those words. Is it really
useless?
“The general coordinate transformation invariance, which is the principle of
general relativity, is natural, because it is a way for humans to recognize the outside
world.” When I was a freshman at university, I was told this by a particle theorist,
Sho Tanaka. Is it true?
As discussed in Chap. 7 of this book, the revolutionary discovery of concepts in
physics is an inverse problem. What performs learning (which is an inverse problem)
is neural networks, which are the means by which humans recognize, think, and
remember the outside world. And, as we have seen repeatedly in this book, artificial
neural networks use the concept of physics when implemented as deep learning and