Does the lottery ticket hypothesis have weird philosophical implications?
As I understand it, the LTH says that insofar as an artificial neural net eventually acquires a competency, it’s because even at the beginning when it was randomly initialized there was a sub-network that happened to already have that competency to some extent at least. The training process was mostly a process of strengthening that sub-network relative to all the others, rather than making that sub-network more competent.
Suppose the LTH is true of human brains as well. Apparently at birth we have almost all the neurons that we will ever have. So… it follows that the competencies we have later in life are already present in sub-networks of our brain at birth.
So does this mean e.g. that there’s some sub-network of my 1yo daughter’s brain that is doing deep philosophical reflection on the meaning of life right now? It’s just drowned out by all the other random noise and thus makes no difference to her behavior?
Does the lottery ticket hypothesis have weird philosophical implications?
As I understand it, the LTH says that insofar as an artificial neural net eventually acquires a competency, it’s because even at the beginning when it was randomly initialized there was a sub-network that happened to already have that competency to some extent at least. The training process was mostly a process of strengthening that sub-network relative to all the others, rather than making that sub-network more competent.
Suppose the LTH is true of human brains as well. Apparently at birth we have almost all the neurons that we will ever have. So… it follows that the competencies we have later in life are already present in sub-networks of our brain at birth.
So does this mean e.g. that there’s some sub-network of my 1yo daughter’s brain that is doing deep philosophical reflection on the meaning of life right now? It’s just drowned out by all the other random noise and thus makes no difference to her behavior?