Have you read Parallel Distributed Processing by McClelland and Rumelhart?

I haven’t finished reading it, but they make the case that if humans are conscious, then PDP is the way Strong AI will be figured out.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/parallel-distributed-processi...

I link it to it in the Nautilus article at the top of thread, and to my thesis work which challenged PDP as a model of children’s learning of the English past tense; more generally the Nautilus article is in some sense my answer to that book.

Just finished reading the article, interesting points.

I agree that there’s too much emphasis on the “robot”, but coming from an academic background in mathematics and psychology (and biology), I cannot take PDP as anything other than “this is how brains work”. Granted, half of PDP, the book, is a series of examples of “ways it might work” from 40 years ago or so, but the other half is about fundamentally tying the psychology to the brain through parallel distributed processing as a conceptual framework.

In that sense, I don’t think PDP can be refuted any more than token economies or political polling can be refuted.

Thoughts?

In the meantime, I will bookmark your thesis for perusal.