Whither Symbols in the Era of Advanced Neural Networks?

Some of the strongest evidence that human minds should be thought of 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 potentially undermines the argument that the cognitive processes and representations used by human minds are symbolic. We consider possible interpretations of these results—that modern neural networks implement symbolic systems, or that they approximate them subsymbolically—and the theoretical consequences of these two possibilities for explanations of human cognition at different levels of analysis. This consideration leads us to offer a new agenda for research on the symbolic basis of the mind.