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by yohui 4928 days ago
First, I don't feel this answers angersock's question concerning concrete applications of cognitive neuroscience to artificial intelligence.

Second, despite running into it time and again over the years, Searle's Chinese room argument still does not much impress me. It seems to me clear that the setup just hides the difficulty and complexity of understanding in the magical lookup table of the book. Since you've probably encountered this sort of response, as well as the analogy from the Chinese room back to the human brain itself, I'm curious what you find useful and compelling in Searle's argument.

I remain interested in biological approaches to cognition and the potential for insights from brain modelling, but I don't see how it's useful to disparage mathematical and statistical approaches, especially without concrete feats to back up the criticism.

1 comments

Yohui, on an iPhone but will do My best.

Traditional AI has had 1/2 a century of failed promises. Jeff's numenta had a major shakeup over this very topic and has only been working with biological inspired AI for the past 3 years. Kurzwell also has just recently come around. Comparing Grok to Watson is like putting a yellow belt up against Bruce lee. Give it some time to catch up

In university I witnessed first hand the insitutional discrimination against biological neural nets. My ordinal point was that google could use the fresh blood and ideas.