[space_fountain]

It seems quite clear to me that human brains are not actually doing much symbolic logic. What symbolic logic we do do has been bolted on using other faculties. I think the problem is that reasoning about our own minds is incredible tough. We want there to be some sort of magic sauce to what makes us, us and so we reject things like ANN's that seem somehow too simple. I think it probably is right that we won't just be able to scale up the number of parameters and get human like performance. There are hints that returns start to level off, but I'm also unsure why people are so sure we can't.

[mindcrime]

It seems quite clear to me that human brains are not actually doing much symbolic logic. What symbolic logic we do do has been bolted on using other faculties.

I agree. But my interest is in engineering something that works, not necessarily in creating an exact replica of the human brain. That's why my interest falls into the domain of symbolic / sub-symbolic integration - because it strikes me as a faster path to more usable computer intelligence.

I have no problem believing that a sufficiently large ANN, with the right training and inference algorithms, could achieve AGI. My problem is that A. right now achieving that seems very out of reach to me (but I could be wrong) and B. it seems unnecessary to me to remain wedded to the idea of 100% (or even 90% or 80% etc.) fidelity with our biological brains. After all, if we want something just like a human brain, we just need a man, a woman, and 9 months of time.

Anyway, I think it's OK to think of engineering in "short cuts" by using things we know computers are good at, and things we already know how to do, and trying to combine them with ANN's in such a way as to make something useful. Will it ever yield AGI? I have no way of knowing. And even if it does, would that approach actually be faster than a pure ANN approach? Again, I don't know. But for now, I spend my time on symbolic/sub-symbolic integration nonetheless.

I think the problem is that reasoning about our own minds is incredible tough.

Yes, definitely.

[space_fountain]

Very fair takes. I could certainly imagine elements being pulled in. For example things like alpha zero are to my understanding already coupling things like tree searches to neural nets. I sort of expect that any general solution would include some of that, but symbolic approaches seem to consistently do worse despite lots of people thinking they won't and plenty of money to be made. I think part of the problem is that what we want with AI is to interface with humans, and humans are using something fuzzy to understand the world so trying to model that rigidly will be hard