Note/Connectionism feels like a reversion to the neoscholastic period…

Connectionism (i.e., artificial neural networks) feels like a reversion to the neoscholastic period in the sense that the answer as to »why objects fall and steam rises« is as epistemologically informative as »because they seek their natural place;« an answer accepted for thousands of years originated during that (i.e., neoscholastic) period. Reformulated using »connectionist doctrine,« the answer is »because large swaths of data indicate that it is their natural place.«

This sentiment is partly triggered by Chomsky’s historical comparison between the neoscholastic period and “mechanical philosophy:”

»The so-called “mechanical philosophy” – mechanical science in modern terminology — […] originating with Galileo and his contemporaries, held that the world is a machine, operating by mechanical principles, much like the remarkable devices that were being constructed by skilled artisans of the day and that stimulated the scientific imagination much as computers do today; devices with gears, levers, and other mechanical components, interacting through direct contact with no mysterious forces relating them. The doctrine held that the entire world is similar: it could in principle be constructed by a skilled artisan, and was in fact created by a super-skilled artisan. The doctrine was intended to replace the resort to “occult properties” on the part of the neoscholastics: their appeal to mysterious sympathies and antipathies, to forms flitting through the air as the means of perception, the idea that rocks fall and steam rises because they are moving to their natural place, and similar notions that were mocked by the new science.« — Noam Chomsky (Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding, 2014)