>You're trying to reduce abstraction to statistical pattern classification, but that doesn't work because statistical measures are inherently bounded in general

>You're trying to reduce abstraction to statistical pattern classification, but that doesn't work because statistical measures are inherently bounded in generality, indeterminate and ambiguous A substrate with a statistical description can still have determinate behavior. The brain, for example is made up of neurons that have a statistical description. But it makes determinate decisions, and presumably can grasp concepts exactly. Thresholding functions, for example, are a mechanism that can transform a statistical process into a determinate outcome. >doesn't mean it's grasped essentially what it means to be a member of that class. I don't know what this means aside from the ability to correctly identify members of that class. But there's no reason to think an ML algorithm cannot do this. Regarding Feser and Searle, there is a lot to say. I think they are demonstrably wrong about computation being observer relative and whether computation is indeterminate[1]. Regarding computations being observer relative, it's helpful to get clear on what computation is. Then it easily follows that a computation is an objective fact of a process. A computer is at its most fundamental an information processing device. This means that the input state has mutual information with something in the world, the computer undergoes some physical process that transforms the input to some output, and this output has further mutual information with something in the world. The input information is transformed by the computer to some different information, thus a computation is revelatory: it has the power to tell you something you didn't know previously. This is why a computer can tell me the inverse of a matrix, while my wall cannot, for example. My wall is inherently non-revelatory no matter how I look at it. This definition is at odds with Searle's definition of a computer as a symbol processing device, but my definition more accurately captures what people mean when they use the term computer and compute. This understanding of a computer is important because the concept of mutual information is mind-independent. There is a fact of the matter whether one system has mutual information with another system. Thus, a computer that is fundamentally a device for meaningfully transforming mutual information is mind independent. [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/bviafb/what_is_the_materialist_response_to_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/bviafb/what_...