4 Grist to the Leibniz Mill
It must be confessed, moreover, that perception, and that
which depends on it, are inexplicable by mechanical causes,
that is, by figures and motions. And, supposing that there
were a mechanism so constructed as to think, feel and
have perception, we might enter it as into a mill. And this
granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which
push one against another, but never anything by which to
explain a perception.
Gottfried Leibniz, sect. 17 (1714/1989)
We have seen that Al's creators claim that these systems
are somehow inherently or predominantly unknowable even
though their mechanisms are not only known but directly
implemented on a computer as a function of known mathe-
matical formalisms (for about half a century or longer, e.g.
Bobrowski 1978; Rumelhart, Durbin, et al. 1995; Rumelhart,
Hinton, et al. 1986; Rumelhart and McClelland 1986; Sanger
1989b; Williams and Zipser 1989, 1995; see Schmidhuber
2015 for a historical perspective). We will tackle this head-
on with an error theory as a corrective and an explanation.
Finally, we can address: how is an ANN a black box to its
own creators? Our error theory to the issues with proclaimed
lack of understanding due to the opaque nature of models
rendering them black boxes comprises three related parts: