Fair. What would you call a “mainstream ML theory of cognition”, though? Last I checked, they were doing purely empirical tinkering with no overarching theory to speak of (beyond the scaling hypothesis
It tends not to get talked about much today, but there was the PDP (connectionist) camp of cognition vs. the camp of “everything else” (including ideas such as symbolic reasoning, etc). The connectionist camp created a rough model of how they thought cognition worked, a lot of cognitive scientists scoffed at it, Hinton tried putting it into actual practice, but it took several decades for it to be demonstrated to actually work. I think a lot of people were confused by why the “stack more layers” approach kept working, but under the model of connectionism, this is expected. Connectionism is kind of too general to make great predictions, but it doesn’t seem to allow for FOOM-type scenarios. It also seems to favor agents as local optima satisficers, instead of greedy utility maximizers.
It tends not to get talked about much today, but there was the PDP (connectionist) camp of cognition vs. the camp of “everything else” (including ideas such as symbolic reasoning, etc). The connectionist camp created a rough model of how they thought cognition worked, a lot of cognitive scientists scoffed at it, Hinton tried putting it into actual practice, but it took several decades for it to be demonstrated to actually work. I think a lot of people were confused by why the “stack more layers” approach kept working, but under the model of connectionism, this is expected. Connectionism is kind of too general to make great predictions, but it doesn’t seem to allow for FOOM-type scenarios. It also seems to favor agents as local optima satisficers, instead of greedy utility maximizers.