Comment by moultano
15 years ago
Chomsky is just appealing to our own biases. We don't want to be statistical approximation machines, so that makes it easy to dismiss attempts to mimic us with statistical approximation machines.
However, the preponderance of evidence* so far suggests that we are just statistical processing machines. Hence why Chomsky seems way off the mark.
*We know that various layers in the visual and auditory systems basically just compute ICA, and we know that the brain is incredibly plastic. Large areas can be removed and the remainder will compensate. That makes it seem likely that all neurons compute something like ICA (or at least that degrades to ICA when confronted with visual or auditory input.)
Chomsky is just appealing to our own biases. We don't want to be statistical approximation machines
Do we? Intellectual cynicism that makes people to publicly reduce humans and humanity to something mechanical and predictable is probably the most popular attitude I see online. This doesn't mean it's wrong in all cases, but surely it's not something exceptional.
The kind of intellectual cynicism you describe is often a prerogative and mode of those highly educated in the sciences, and therefore of a very small majority of humans generally, who otherwise in my experience do tend to think of themselves as agents free of statistical determinations and as having wills and minds rather than cogs of any sort.
this statement is exactly the attitude described by romaniv.
Statistical learning as a field benefits humans most when its augments our actions. I think instead of comparing humans and statistical algorithms to see who fares better, we should focus on how the two can blend together, and help each other out. As the author points out, all the success stories are largely man-machine collaborations (imagine search engines without user data and inputs).