The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic
As Pitts began his work at MIT, he realized that although genetics must encode for gross neural features, there was no way our genes could pre-determine the trillions of synaptic connections in the brain—the amount of information it would require was untenable. It must be the case, he figured, that we all start out with essentially random neural networks—highly probable states containing negligible information (a thesis that continues to be debated to the present day). He suspected that by altering the thresholds of neurons over time, randomness could give way to order and information could emerge.