Further to all this I must assure you that all of the above is not some attempt at sophistry or trying to score internet points: what we discuss here goes right

Further to all this I must assure you that all of the above is not some attempt at sophistry or trying to score internet points: what we discuss here goes right at the heart of my doctoral research. You can get some background on the problems I've dealt with if you search online for Inductive Logic Programming and Statistical Relational Learning. People in my research community have grappled with these questions for a long time and tried to put together the pieces of the puzzle: relations, functions, algorithms, programs, logic, probabilities, statistics, learning, reasoning... the human mind. They have consistently failed because the pieces of the puzzle don't fit. I think in modern machine learning people have simply given up on trying to make any coherent image out of the puzzle pieces and just bashed them until they yielded and are now wedged together in incongruous patterns that sort of show some kind of image, there. But the incongruities are still felt, like nails on a blackboard.