Non-Zero Radius: The Missing Component of Neural Networks

Abstract

Inspired by the analogy between the all-or-none activation of biological neurons and the true-false of logic circuits, McCulloch and Pitts proposed a mathematical model of the biological neuron in 1943 with the aim of simulating logical reasoning. Although Norbert Wiener considered the model overly simplistic at the time, it later became a building block of modern neural networks, including large language models. Despite their remarkable empirical success, however, conventional neural networks remain largely black-box systems and struggle with reliable symbolic reasoning. Viewing vectors as spheres of zero radius, we relax the zero-radius constraint and represent concepts as spheres with non-zero radii. We argue that sphere-based representations can capture additional features of biological cognition, including representing spatial concepts as regions and reasoning through model construction and inspection. Building on sphere embeddings, we introduce Sphere Neural Networks (SphNNs), which use a transition map to achieve symbolic-level Aristotelian syllogistic reasoning without training data, thereby taking an initial step toward the original goal of McCulloch and Pitts. We suggest that the zero-radius constraint may reflect an aspect of the oversimplification identified by Wiener and may limit conventional neural networks' capacity for symbolic-level logical reasoning.