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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05776 |
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| _version_ | 1866916886855286784 |
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| author | Griffiths, Thomas L. Lake, Brenden M. McCoy, R. Thomas Pavlick, Ellie Webb, Taylor W. |
| author_facet | Griffiths, Thomas L. Lake, Brenden M. McCoy, R. Thomas Pavlick, Ellie Webb, Taylor W. |
| contents | Some of the strongest evidence that human minds should be thought about in terms of symbolic systems has been the way they combine ideas, produce novelty, and learn quickly. We argue that modern neural networks -- and the artificial intelligence systems built upon them -- exhibit similar abilities. This undermines the argument that the cognitive processes and representations used by human minds are symbolic, although the fact that these neural networks are typically trained on data generated by symbolic systems illustrates that such systems play an important role in characterizing the abstract problems that human minds have to solve. This argument leads us to offer a new agenda for research on the symbolic basis of human thought. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_05776 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Whither symbols in the era of advanced neural networks? Griffiths, Thomas L. Lake, Brenden M. McCoy, R. Thomas Pavlick, Ellie Webb, Taylor W. Artificial Intelligence Some of the strongest evidence that human minds should be thought about in terms of symbolic systems has been the way they combine ideas, produce novelty, and learn quickly. We argue that modern neural networks -- and the artificial intelligence systems built upon them -- exhibit similar abilities. This undermines the argument that the cognitive processes and representations used by human minds are symbolic, although the fact that these neural networks are typically trained on data generated by symbolic systems illustrates that such systems play an important role in characterizing the abstract problems that human minds have to solve. This argument leads us to offer a new agenda for research on the symbolic basis of human thought. |
| title | Whither symbols in the era of advanced neural networks? |
| topic | Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05776 |