[drdeca]

I find this analogy kind of confusing? Wouldn’t the analogous thing be to say that our DNA doesn’t understand, uh, how we are able to skateboard? But like, we generally don’t regard DNA as understanding anything, so that not unexpected.

Where does “we can’t tell whether a person possesses the skill of ‘skateboarding’?” fit in with, DNA not encoding anything specific to skateboarding? It isn’t as if we designed our genome and therefore if our genome did hard-code skateboarding skill that we would therefore (as designers of our genome) have full understanding of how skateboarding skill works at the neuron level.

I recognize that a metaphor/analogy/whatever does not have to extend to all parts of something, and indeed most metaphors/analogies/whatever fail at some point if pushed too far. But, I don’t understand how the commonalities you are pointing to between [NN architecture : full NN network with the specific weights] and [human genome : the whole behavior of a person’s brain including all the facts, behaviors, etc. that they’ve learned throughout their life] is supposed to apply to the example of _knowing_that_ a person knows how to skateboard?

It is quite possible that I’m being dense.

Could you please elaborate on the analogy / the point you are making with the analogy?

[mapt]

The brain is just an example of a system we are all running that we understand the baseline mechanics of, but which for any task much more complex than breathing, is accomplished through a novel self-organizing structure using a lot of iteration. Other than very broad-strokes regional distinctions, the brain is not organized by some plan that existed before construction, and is not comprised of intelligible dedicated circuit that we can observe postmortem with perfect information.

The sheer number and variety and networking of synapses involved in the skill 'skateboarding' is irreducibly, unintelligibly complex for an intelligence on the scale of a conscious human mind to describe, fully comprehend, or even recognize with a great deal of analysis. Even if you decided all the functional pathworks through the network in one example, you would not be able to decode another because every skateboarder has trained their neural network in a unique manner.

[noboostforyou]

> the brain is not organized by some plan that existed before construction, and is not comprised of intelligible dedicated circuit that we can observe postmortem with perfect information.

Well said. You've reminded me of a beautiful sci-fi short story almost about this exact "mystery"

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/