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by s0ulphire 1225 days ago
I'll dig up a source in a bit, but there is a critical period of development in which a child must be exposed to language, or they will fail to develop the very core skills that you're suggesting are innate abilities in a person regardless of their upbringing. This is exactly how you learned everything you know; your parents talked to you. Language grants you the ability to define concepts in the first place, without which you have no ability to recognise them as you have no language with which to think about them in the first place. So what specifically differentiates the way your brain learned to classify objects and words from the way a NN does? And what stops a NN from being able to develop concepts based on the relationship of those new definitions in the same way you do? IMO arguably it's just a matter of processing power and configuration of the network.
1 comments

> the very core skills that you're suggesting are innate abilities in a person regardless of their upbringing

I have made no such claim.

> This is exactly how you learned everything you know; your parents talked to you.

This is not even remotely close to being correct.

> Language grants you the ability to define concepts in the first place

There is a vast literature in cognitive science that disagrees with you.

Feel free to point me to something specific, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation