- SVMs aren't really probabilistic models. They don't need to be thought of in a way that assumes underlying statistical properties of what they're measuring. Many machine learning methods (decision trees for one) are similarly agnostic.
- Reality is a probabilistic process. Brains work probabilistically at least in the sense that the underlying biomechanics have some statistical distribution.
I have the feeling the author doesn't really understand what "probability" means, as he more or less admits.