alt Hacker NewsI agree that symbolic processing still has a role - but I think it's the same role it has for us: formal reasoning. I.e. a specialized tool.
"Logical consistency" is exactly the kind of red herring that got us stuck with symbolic approach longer than it should. Humans aren't logically consistent either - except in some special situations, such as solving logic problems in school.
Nothing in how we think, how we perceive the world, categorize it and communicate about it has any sharp boundaries. Everything gets fuzzy or ill-defined if you focus on it. It's not by accident. It should've been apparent even then, that we think stochastically, not via formal logic. Or maybe the Bayesian interpretation of probabilities was too new back then?
Related blind alley we got stuck in for way longer than we should've (many people are still stuck there) is in trying to model natural language using formal grammars, or worse, argue that our minds must be processing them this way. It's not how language works. LLMs are arguably a conclusive empirical proof of that.
Yeah, I agree logic and symbolic reasoning have to be _applications_ of intelligence, not the actual substrate. My gut feel is that intelligence is almost definitionally chaotic and opaque. If one thing prevents superhuman AGI, I suspect it will be that targeted improvements in intelligence are almost impossible, and it will come down to the energy we can throw at the problem and the experiments we're able to run and evaluate.