[stormbuilder]

Wouldn't that be a self-supervised learning? Yes, as the brain lears, it gets rewarded or not, but not by any external organism - rather by itself (or a part of itself). The "learning instruction manual" is in there somewhere.

So if you are able to code an AI so that it can run experiments over itself and gradually build this "learning instruction manual" eventually it will become able to do things you never though of in the first place.

[fallingfrog]

I think that's what the AlphaGo team did - they trained their agent against itself, and it learned new moves not explicitly programmed in! With an evaluation function just saying ahead / not ahead.