I want you to think about how you learn. Not the learning styles, mind; no, I want you to give your learning process a long hard deep thought. Think of the various ways you learn. Maybe you've touched a stove while it's hot once. Or if you ever learned a new language, maybe you started out by memorizing phrases before becoming fluent. Think about all the chapters that had preceded this. What do they have in common?
In broad strokes, learning is done by means of corrections. If you touched a stove while it's hot, you made a mistake. The correction is to never touch a stove when it's hot ever again. You've learned how not to touch the stove while it's hot.
Similarly, the way a neural network learns is by means of correction. If we want to train a machine to learn to classify handwriting, we would need to provide some sample images, and tell...