2. The Learning Machines: Neural Networks and Regimes of Recognition

The peculiarity of men and animals is that they have the power of adjusting themselves to almost all the features [of their environment]. The feature to which adjustment is made on a particular occasion is the one the man is attending to and he attends to what he is interested in. His interests are determined by his appetites, desires, drives, instincts — all the things that together make up his “springs of action.” If we want to construct a machine which will vary its attention to things in its environment so that it will sometimes adjust itself to one and sometimes to another, it would seem to be necessary to equip the machine with something corresponding to a set of appetites. — Richard Braithwaite, “Can Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said to Think?”