Gary Marcus

5/ My reaction to @GaryMarcus's call for hybrid systems in that essay is that he doesn't sufficiently recognize that good hybrid systems will (1) represent P and Q in a distributed fashion, (2) *learn* P and Q and the form of their relationship. That's surely how brains do it.

“Surely” seems a bit strong here — what’s your logic? I did allow in the Medium essay for embeddings (distributed codes) as a way of representing instances of variables, said that was more modern than my 2001 proposal.

I think “surely” is appropriate here actually... On (1): that the brain uses distributed codes is well established empirically and not really a Q anymore, (2) Most relational reasoning is learned. There may be some relations or concepts that are innate, but they’re limited, IMO.

2. distributed codes for motor yes; but does brain exclusively use distributed codes? why Oprah neurons

oprah neurons are not real

Quite. In fact, the data explicitly disproves any kind of grandmother cells. Consider for a moment the “Jennifer Anniston cells” that were reported in the media several years ago:

The researchers were recording from a *very* small subset of all neurons in the temporal lobes, and presenting ppl with a *very, very* small set of stimuli from the set of all possible stimuli. Yet, they found cells that responded to their stimuli. What does that tell us?

We’ll, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga explained it very clearly. The Jennifer Aniston cell was actually a “Rachel in Friends” cell that also fire, at lower rate, for Monica and Phoebe.