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The original was posted on /r/singularity by /u/liqui_date_me on 2024-10-13 18:07:29+00:00.

As happy as I am that Hinton and Hopfield won the Nobel prize in physics, I can’t help but wonder:

1. Does this indicate that we’re finding fewer breakthroughs in Physics?
2. Or does this signify a new philosophical paradigm, namely that as a species, we’ve entered an era where we know that there might be limits to our intuition about the laws of nature? That there might be laws of nature that dictate how proteins fold that might not be discoverable to modern chemistry or physics or biology, but with enough data, these laws can be discovered by neural networks and implemented in them to produce systems that can recreate these laws for arbitrary inputs. That it represents a fundamental shift in our philosophical perspective about what is possible - that there are problems that we will never be able to come up with an elegant quantitative theory for, but that neural networks will be able to solve with extremely high accuracy.

The second bullet point definitely goes against my intuitions of nature, which dictate that everything is deterministic in physics at the macro level and is uncertain and probabilistic at the quantum level.