Machine Learning is more of an engineering discipline than a philosophical one. The aim (mostly, with exceptions) is to make machines that learn, not to researc

Machine Learning is more of an engineering discipline than a philosophical one. The aim (mostly, with exceptions) is to make machines that learn, not to research the nature of "understanding" or "concepts". There are people who are looking at broader ideas of "what is intelligence", sometimes even the same people doing the more statistical research, but it's an open ended problem. The main reason science/math/statistics doesn't spend time worrying about philosophy is because you can't really specify the problem cleanly - and having a clear idea of the problem is 90% of the way to finding the solution. [edit]: If you want brain-inspired ML stuff, it's worth looking at what neuroscientists and cognitive scientists are doing. From what I've seen of some of their work they're developing ML algos as minimal tests for understanding how parts of the brain or consciousness works.