I don't disagree with any of it, and I think perhaps my non-chalant "Who cares?" somehow conveyed to you that I think something stated was false. I don't.
But, why waste time with this?
You cannot not reduce it to statistics, vast majority of your cognitive activity is statistical in nature, in the more general sense of the word.
Most here believe statistics are globally applicable, even in domains dealing with the odd, esoteric, or random. With that said..
- Hofstadster tries non-strictly-statistical-methods
- "but you can't be non-statistical!"
- lumps hofstadter into statistical ai > "but hofstadter is non-conformist!"
- create seperate subgroup which hofstadter can exist within with his experiments
- "but you can't be non-statistical!"
... and on and on. Is this the kind of recursion geb was talking about?
A lot of us think we know statistics are universally applicable. It's a waste of time to state, and adds little to the discussion overall. Sorry that it came off so negatively, either before in my first post or now. I don't mean it that way.