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There's a huge middle ground between reducing cognition to statistics (as you seem to be proposing) and "abstracting away" the statistics. You seem to be accusi
by hharrison 13y ago
There's a huge middle ground between reducing cognition to statistics (as you seem to be proposing) and "abstracting away" the statistics. You seem to be accusing any approach that's not "statistics all the way down" of ignoring the statistical nature of the mind. When in fact, there are many approaches to cognition which make heavy uses of advances in statistical theory without reducing cognition to statistics.
What you're proposing is an overly reductionist ontology, IMO, and yet I agree that statistics are important, if not critical. (Hint: not the boring linear kind of statistics that you so often see in Big Data)
- upquark 13y agoNo I'm not arguing for a statistics-only scheme, just that you can't ignore it / abstract it away, and that its role is crucial in cognition. I think we agree with each other.
- hharrison 13y agoWell, you said "you cannot not reduce it [AI] to statistics". And I'm saying, not only is it possible to not reduce AI to statistics, it is desirable. It's the reduce part that I have a hard time with.
- upquark 13y agoPossibly poor wording, my intent was to say that you cannot dismiss or underestimate statistics in modeling the mind because the damn thing is a sophisticated statistical information retrieval system (with some higher-level structure on top for doing things like debating mind modeling on HN).