it seems to me that while humans are built out of neural nets, we are capable of logic, and the sort of reasoning that seems to be fall under the category of "t

it seems to me that while humans are built out of neural nets, we are capable of logic, and the sort of reasoning that seems to be fall under the category of "tree search" in this conversation. in that sense, it would seem that we can do deductive logical reasoning, and we run that software on neural net hardware (slash firmware/software). so, why the slavishness among some to neural nets and building everything on top of that? why emulate logic processing on top of associative processing and then mesh the two, when you could just do associative processing and mesh it with more "native" logic processing, since man-made computing hardware already does that easily? also: this has been brought up here and elsewhere before, but as the article mentions: "Just yesterday, a few hours before the Go paper was made public, I went to a talk where a graduate student of a deep learning expert acknowledged that (a) people in that field still don’t really understand why their models work as they well as they do and (b) they still can’t really guarantee much of anything if you test them in circumstances that differ significantly from the circumstances on which they were trained. To many neural network people, Minsky represents the evil empire. But almost half a century later they still haven’t fully faced up to his challenges." let's keep in mind that some of the biggest mistakes humans make come from unexamined associative reasoning. let's also keep in mind that this crowd tends to be particularly suspect of the sort of not-strictly-logical associative heuristics that we associate (haha) with more mainstream society (unexamined articles of faith, habits and social customs that have unintended deleterious effects, etc). one of my favorite failures of loose associative reasoning is racism, so here's a link many of you have probably seen, but it's an important thing to keep in mind, so here it is anyway: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/upshot/when-algorithms-discriminate.html?abt=0002&abg=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/upshot/when-algorithms-dis... let's not reproduce some of our species' biggest flaws just because it let us expediently reach some narrowly defined (and likely immediately financially desirable) goal. i realized i've sort of conflated my points here: it is entirely possible to implement all sorts of terrible things (like racism) using logic. there's certainly no shortage of spurious logic to justify all sorts of bad behavior. axioms need to be sound and nuance needs to be considered. but i think my general point is that humans aren't some sort of model of perfection, and should not be copied as such.