Symbolic AI seems to me inherently a wrong concept.<p>&gt; <i>A more contrived relation to this in real life that I&#x27;ve been thinking about: if a child knocks over a vase, you might be angry at them, and they might have done the wrong thing. But why did they do it? If a child can explain to you that they knew you were afraid of insects, and swung at a fly going by, that can help you debug that social circumstance so you and the child can work together towards better behavior in the future.</i><p>Maybe. What if the real reason was a combination of a misconfigured bayesian network in child&#x27;s head that mistakenly assigned high probability to seeing a fly when there was a dust speck combined with an overreactive heuristics that made it start waving hands around? Or something? There may not be a reason that can be specified in symbols relevant to anything else.<p>In general, a rational reasoner modelling a probability network would make a decision because all the items upstream added up to a particular distribution downstream. There are no symbols involved in such computation, and it would be strange to suddenly include them now.<p>Also, if you really sit do and do some serious introspecting, you&#x27;ll realize that any symbols we assign to explain our thoughts are arbitrary and after-the-fact. Brains don&#x27;t run on symbols, they generate them later for communications.