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by voidhorse 362 days ago
I only skimmed it so far, but this seems to only argue against the functional import of the OP, not its philosophical import.

On my reading, the philosophical claim is that these models do not develop an actual logical, internal representation of domains.

The functional import is whether or not they are able to realize specific behaviors within a domain. The paper argues that a markov process can realize the functional equivalence of the initial goal oriented picture of its domain—that is can solve goals with an error bound—but not that it develops an actual representation of the domain.

Lack of an actual representation prevents such a machine from doing other things. For example, iiuc, it would be unable to solve problems in domains that are homomorphic to the original, while an explicit representation does enable this.