Gary Marcus

Ohhh ok

If it were true recursive relational reasoning is learned,then why is it that the only known brain architecture able to acquire it is the human's? Simply size? Unlikely to me. A chimp is not obviously more capable than a corvid yet the latter's brain is,on watts basis,downscaled

Or upscale: The lf pilot whale has more neurons in its neocortex than a human. Species specific specializations don't seem trivializable. Also, note that a component based combinatorial code works just as well as distributed representation, with advantage of better handling

or let's say not vulnerable to leaks which occur from using any soft similarity metric--assuming distributed means implicitly acts on vectors. At some point you need to explain how humans can reason crisply to prove things about riemanian sums, measures and gaussian integrals .

Sure, but you do not understand Riemann sums innately - you learned about them. Humans clearly have some innate ability to learn about abstract systems that other species may not, but the learning is innate, not the concepts and relations themselves.

That's irrelevant though. Humans didn't evolve to learn those things. So there's unique innate machinery that's been repurposed. Eg permission schemas for abduction. Machinery for reasoning spatially with a graph based representation (easily confused for grids) for symbolic, coup

coupled with whatever allows us to learn recursive grammars and combinatorially compose atomic concepts. Once you have that, getting to a system that can derive Newton's Laws by looking at how things fall is a comparatively short step.

I think for example, the fact that cerebellum and motor cortex is recruited for even mathematical reasoning--and one may quibble over how innate is defined--suggests that at least the basis and initial stages are by analogy with/to innate capabilities.