What is a "hybrid" model?

[Jeff Shrager]

On Fri, 5 Apr 1996, Lev Goldfarb wrote:

> > In sum, my point is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish
> > the existence or non-existence of genuinely different *types* of learning
> > solely from behavioral phenomena, however augmented by theory or
> > mathematics.
> 
> In view of this, why do then most of us ignore the scientific experience
> of the last four centuries that strongly suggest the scientific parsimony
> (in that case - one basic learning "mechanism")?
> Are we ready (i.e. adequately "educated") to deal with the greatest
> scientific challenge of cognitive science?

I'm sorry, but this is all noise.  The brain is a complicated machine.
Saying that a car runs on "one basic principle" of chemistry (or
physics) isn't saying anything important about a car as pertains to
most people's interactions with it (except maybe people who are hit by
its momentum :-) The "scientific experience of the last four
centuries" (at least that little (though important!) spec of it that
Lev is apparently referring to) explicitly eschews complexity, or
turns it into abstract complexity (such as chaos theory), neither of
which approach tells you very much about the real McCoy.  If you care
about the real brain, the abstract and general theories are important,
interesting, and useful, but they are NOT the whole story.

I'm sorry to say that this is going to quickly turn into the same old
relogious war, and I'd really like to propose that we take it offline.

-- Jeff