[dboreham]

> but it was spread across a billion years of evolution from simple animals to Homo Sapiens

Hard disagree. Evolution made a bigger/better neural processor, and it made better/different I/O devices and I/O pre-processing pipelines. But it didn't store any information in the DNA of the kind you're proposing. That's not how it works. The brain is entirely "field programmable", in all animals (I assert). There is no "pre-training".

[saeranv]

A simple counter example here is instinctual behaviour. A sea turtle is born, and with little to no guidance, experimentation, or exploration heads to the sea. That knowledge is embedded at birth.

I think the analogy of the brain as hardware devices ("neural processor", "I/0 devices", etc) is misleading. I think I understand the very strict mind-matter dualism you're alluding to here. But so far attempts at using actual computer hardware to reproduce human-like cognition has gotten nowhere close, despite consuming order of magnitude more energy and data.

[tsimionescu]

That is certainly false. You're born with plenty of very specific reflexes, and with lots of information about how to use our neural wiring to control much of our body. We are born with certain associations built in (good and bad smells, good and bad tastes, certain shapes that scare us, liking shiny objects, and many others).

This is all somewhat hard to gage in human babies, as we take a relatively long time to become functional. However, it's clear when looking at many other mammals - baby reindeer or horses, for example, are able to run within minutes of being born; they can see, they can interpret the images they see as objects, they understand things like object permanence, they can approximate distances and speeds, they have a simple theory of mind and can interact with other agents, they can recognize their mother's udders and suckle at them for food, and many many other tasks that they have 0 training for. The only possible conclusion is that their brains are pre-trained, and they are only performing some quick fine-tuning based on experience in their first hours of life.