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by Gibbon1 2737 days ago
I think the the fixation on symbolic reasoning comes from ignorance at how hard classification is vs how hard pure mechanical symbolic operations are for humans. It's easy to make the mistake of thinking that since a computer can rapidly multiply two numbers together (hard for humans) that they were operating at a higher level than human brains.

Turns out this is wrong. Human brains are very efficient.

2 comments

> Human brains are very efficient.

At some things, not all.

Subsymbolic systems, such as ANN are clearly good at some things and symbolic systems are better at others.

It is argued that symbolic reasoning is required for what we might call higher levels of intelligence (lets assume this is correct).

Symbolic systems have struggled in the realms of grounding a symbol to something in the physical world, because its messy and complex, i.e. the area where subsymbolic systems play best.

If we assume that ANN are approximately akin to natural brains, then can we take that they are examples of a subsymbolic system able to, with the correct architecture, produce (perhaps the wrong word) a symbolic resoning system?

Perhaps this emergence ontop of the subsymbolic processing is what humans (and others to varying degrees) possess. Perhaps in the past (GOFAI) suffered because it was going top down, or not even going down to subsymbolic to ground the symbols.

Perhaps ANN struggles because its not going up to symbolic reasoning.

Then also perhaps ANN (or organic brains), which evolved where reaction/perception give the critical survival advantage, then only much later did symbolic become possible and beneficial, however wit hardware that wasnt necessarily developed for that in most efficient way.

Being of the belief that ANN are sufficient for AGI (for 20+ years), and possibly offer an elegant solution, I currently think that they are at this time, not the most efficient (nor plausible with the current compute/hardware, or for many years (probably my lifetime)). Practical progress imho is likely in hybridisation of ANN and Logic (however I'm not referring to hand baked rules), and even propose a mixed hardware might even supersede a pure ANN or what evolution has provided in the brain.

100% agree. I am terrible at mental arithmetic, but I am exceedingly good at performing symbolic operations playing bullet chess. It's primarily a visual or geometric calculation, not purely abstract like math.

I think most people don't realize that our brains have this ability. But all you need to do is spend a few months learning chess and you'll see for yourself.