Is the human brain a big deep learning network? Certainly not, for many reasons, but the similarities are illuminating. The brain has around a hundred billion neurons connected by a hundred trillion synapses, and by the time we are eighteen we have been absorbing examples from our environments for more than three hundred million waking seconds. So we are prepared to do a lot of pattern-matching and associating, just like these networks. The networks are tailor-made for the fuzzy family resemblance categories that make up so much of our conceptual repertoire. Neural networks thus provide clues
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