I think humans do symbolic as well as non symbolic reasoning. This is what is often called “hybrid”. I don’t think DL is doing symbolic reasoning, but LeCun is advocating some sort of alternative symbolic systems as you suggest. Errors are a bit of a side issue because both symbolic and non symbolic systems are error prone.
The paradox that I point out is that Python is symbolic, yet DL can mimic its syntax to a very high degree. This shows that DL cannot be informative about the nature of the phenomenon it is mimicking. You could argue that Python is not symbolic. This would obviously be wrong. But people DO use the same argument to show that natural language and cognition is not symbolic. I am saying this could be wrong too. So DL is not uncovering some deep properties of cognition .. it is merely doing some clever statistical mappings
BUT it can only learn the mappings where the symbolic system produces lots of examples, like language. When the symbol system is used for planning, creativity, etc., this is where DL struggles to learn.
I think humans do symbolic as well as non symbolic reasoning. This is what is often called “hybrid”. I don’t think DL is doing symbolic reasoning, but LeCun is advocating some sort of alternative symbolic systems as you suggest. Errors are a bit of a side issue because both symbolic and non symbolic systems are error prone.
The paradox that I point out is that Python is symbolic, yet DL can mimic its syntax to a very high degree. This shows that DL cannot be informative about the nature of the phenomenon it is mimicking. You could argue that Python is not symbolic. This would obviously be wrong. But people DO use the same argument to show that natural language and cognition is not symbolic. I am saying this could be wrong too. So DL is not uncovering some deep properties of cognition .. it is merely doing some clever statistical mappings
BUT it can only learn the mappings where the symbolic system produces lots of examples, like language. When the symbol system is used for planning, creativity, etc., this is where DL struggles to learn.