A general philosophy lecture I listened to about five years ago was describing gravity, and contemporary reactions to Isaac Newton’s fresh law of gravitation. The suggestion was absurd at the time: gravity occurs when particles attract each other, despite there being no mechanical connection between them. What?!? Even now, over 300 years later the idea seems crazy.
In the second edition of his Principia, Newton used the legendary phrase ‘hypotheses non fingo’ in response to those contemporaries who remarked on the apparent madness of his theory. Those critics, fair enough, were wondering how the particles, which gravity brought together, could be communicating their position in space with one another without some kind of messaging channel to connect them? ‘Hypotheses non fingo,’ Newton shrugged (essentially, ‘I won’t make up any hypotheses’). His empiricism, which simply corroborated his equations with no trace of an explanation about how or why gravity worked like that, sounds almost like resignation. From time to time I say that same phrase when a neural network works, as I have close to no idea why, why, why.