Oh I've read and participated in so many variations of this topic. Nothing you said is new to me nor do I necessarily disagree with. It was a single statement

Oh I've read and participated in so many variations of this topic. Nothing you said is new to me nor do I necessarily disagree with. It was a single statement to point out that similarities exist to someone who believed there were none. Unfortunately your giddiness to point out this false equivalence is misplaced as I was careful to make no such assertion. Ah and there is indeed not a universal agreed upon definition of intelligence, but the parent looks to be operating on a set of definitions that preclude them all (hint: general reasoning ability). The nuance you miss however is we do in fact have a pretty good idea what human intelligence looks like, and parent is excluding NNs of even that (general reasoning and problem solving, again). > Brains are embodied organs in an overall organism which lives in a dynamic changing world where ecology, cybernetics, control theory, complexity and dynamical systems theory, semantics and semiotics all will play a part in understanding it. Not just neural networks. All true, but guess what. There may be different roads to intelligence. Random walk through evolution and physical processes is one such pathway. Possibly an alternative pathway in a digital medium may reduce all these physical analogues to "mere" NN expression and matmuls. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theo... I'm interested in updating any of my priors if you have resources to point to. Also since you're a philosophy major I would hope you agree with me when I point out how undeveloped OP's understanding is about philosophical matters, when he says stuff like > Inference doesn't think about stuff but training does Like there's so much confusion there it's hard to unpack.