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godelski 2 hours ago

We do.

There's a lot of innate knowledge but all neuroscience demonstrates how incredibly flexible the brain is. Brains constantly learn and rewire.

Here's a few things that I think show how crazy it is AND stress those points

  - people that have had corpus callosotomy (brain cut in half) *may* be indistinguishable from a normal person. Depends on how young you were when you underwent the procedure
    - true for most brain injuries
    - can even include the frontal cortex
  - you can learn to ecolocate
  - people with Aphantasia are indistinguishable from others
  - people without an internal monologue are indistinguishable from those with one
  - people can learn to use prosthetics
    - even without disabilities
    - or look into MRI scans with tool use
You can convince yourself that we're just organic robots (after all, there's no magic), but you would be a fool to convince yourself we're the ordinary kind.

We are constantly learning. You aren't just born with your knowledge and it stays static. We are extremely proficient at metalearning (learning how to learn, few shot learning, zero shot learning [0,1]). Our brains are constantly rewiring, able to heal from traumatic damage.

I could go on and on. Does information pass down through genetics? Of course! But that's far from the whole story.

I'm tired of people trying to make AI sentient by making humans robotic. Stop trying to trivialize everything and be okay not knowing the answer to everything. You're human, you're designed to learn and explore, not sit and argue from an armchair

[0] and I mean these in the original sense. Not in the sense that you train on a billion examples of labeled animals and then congratulate yourself on your ImageNet-1k held out test performance. That's not zero shot, that's just a test set

[1] I can literally make up words and you'll understand them. Or use words in novel ways. That's literally how slang works and how new words come to be. Don't be a walibanut ya glufus. Read some SciFi