Transformers and causal inference
“Der Gegenstand ist einfach.”
It’s 1916. The flames of war consume Europe. A young Austrian man of Jewish descent arrives at a hospital in Kraków, injured in an industrial explosion. He’s a volunteer soldier who served in an Austrian artillery regiment.
There’s something that differentiates him from other young men in the hospital.
His backpack is full of notes.
He keeps them close, but the notes are not a diary. They consist of a set of remarks on logic, ethics, language, and religion. Some of them were taken while he was still in the trenches of the Eastern Front.
The young man’s name is Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his notes will later become the basis of the only book he will publish in his lifetime – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein, 1922).
The book will become one of the most significant works of 20th-century Western philosophy.
One...
