[mindcrime]

Good points all around. I think OpenCog has a lot of good ideas, but I won't claim that it's the "be all, end all", as of today. That said, I think to some extent the statement "there just wasn't enough rigor and coordination between the compoents" may be true exactly because that is the central challenge that still remains to be solved.

At the very least, I think reading Goertzel's books[1] and looking at OpenCog is a good introduction to the issues at hand in a general sense.

Totally agree on the causal learning thing. And that's an area that also seems to have had a resurgence of interest and activity lately.

[1]: Here I specifically mean Engineering General Intelligence, Volumes 1 & 2