How Aristotle is Fixing Deep Learning's Flaws

A summary of some key points of Aristotelian logic and epistemology and how their absence in traditional deep learning is responsible for deep learning’s well-known limitations

How Aristotle is fixing deep learning’s flaws

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Who can deny the chilly breeze blowing through some quarters of the AI world? While many continue to bask in the glorious summertime ushered in by the ascendency of deep learning, some are sensing autumnal winds which carry with them cautionary words we have all heard many times, such as “black box”, “poor generalization”, “brittle”, “lacking reasoning”, “biased”, “no common sense”, and “unsustainable”. Whether or not we are truly headed for a new AI winter, artificial intelligence certainly has a long way to go to take on human intelligence.

And yet, human intelligence is not a particularly new topic of research. It has long been studied by many of mankind’s most piercing intellects, going back at least 2300 years to Aristotle, the “father of logic” and the “father of psychology”. Through the six works comprising his Organon, as well as a few others such as his Metaphysics and On the Soul, Aristotle laid the foundations for our understanding of logic, reasoning, and knowledge. It was so thorough, in fact, that 2000 years later Kant wrote, “Since Aristotle…logic has not been able to advance a single step.”